13. Page Faults of Immaturity
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A great portion of the errors and mistakes—and of what we call the follies, of children, arise from simple ignorance. Principles of philosophy, whether pertaining to external nature or to mental action, are involved which have never come home to their minds. They may have been presented—but they have not been understood and appreciated. It requires some tact—and sometimes delicate observation, on the part of the mother—to determine whether an action which she sees ought to be corrected, results from childish ignorance and inexperience, or from willful wrong-doing. Whatever may be the proper treatment in the latter case, it is evident that in the former what is required is not censure—but instruction.
'Boasting'.
A mother came into the room one day and found Johnny disputing earnestly with his cousin Jane on the question of who was the tallest—Johnny very strenuously maintaining that he was the tallest, 'because he was a boy'. His older brother, James, who was present at the time, measured them—and found that Johnny in reality was the tallest.
Now there was nothing wrong in his feeling a pride and pleasure in the thought that he was physically superior to his cousin—and though it was foolish for him to insist himself on this superiority in a boasting way, it was the foolishness of ignorance only. He had not learned the principle—which half of mankind do not seem ever to learn during the whole course of their lives—that it is far wiser and better to let our good qualities appear naturally of themselves, than to claim credit for them by boasting. It would have been much wiser for Johnny to have admitted at the outset that Jane might possibly be taller than he—and then to have awaited quietly the result of the measuring.
But we cannot blame him much for not having learned this particular wisdom at five years of age, when so many full-grown men and women never learn it at all.
Nor was there anything blameworthy in him in respect to the false logic involved in his argument, that his being a boy made him necessarily taller than his cousin, a girl of the same age. There was a 'semblance' of proof in that fact—what the logicians term a presumption. But the reasoning powers are very slowly developed in childhood. They are very seldom aided by any instruction really adapted to the improvement of them; and we ought not to expect that such children can at all clearly distinguish a semblance from a reality in ideas so extremely abstruse, as those relating to the logical connection between the premises and the conclusion in a process of rationalization.
In this case as in the other we expect them to understand at once, without instruction, what we find it extremely difficult to learn ourselves; for a large portion of mankind prove themselves utterly unable ever to discriminate between sound arguments and those which are utterly inconsequent and absurd.
In a word, what Johnny requires in such a case as this is, not ridicule to shame him out of his false reasoning, nor censure or punishment to cure him of his boasting—but simplyinstruction.
And this instruction, it is much better to give 'not' in direct connection with the occurrence which indicated the need of it. If you attempt to explain to your boy the folly of boasting in immediate connection with some act of boasting of his own, he feels that you are really finding fault with him; his mind instinctively puts itself into a position of defense—and the truth which you wish to impart to it finds a much less easy admission.
If, for example, in this case Johnny's mother attempts on the spot to explain to him the folly of boasting—and to show how much wiser it is for us to let our good qualities, if we have any, speak for themselves, without any direct agency of ours in claiming the merit of them, he listens reluctantly and nervously as to a scolding in disguise. If he is a well-managed boy, he waits, perhaps, to hear what his mother has to say—but it makes no impression. If he is badly trained, he will probably interrupt his mother in the midst of what she is saying, or break away from her to go on with his play.
'A right Mode of Treatment.'
If now, instead of this, the mother waits until the dispute and the transaction of measuring have passed by and been forgotten—and then takes some favorable opportunity to give the required 'instruction', the result will be far more favorable. At some time, when tired of his play, he comes to stand by her to observe her at her work, or perhaps to ask her for a story; or, after she has put him to bed and is about to leave him for the night, she says to him as follows:
"I'll tell you a story about two boys, Jack and Henry—and you shall tell me which of them came off best. They both went to the same school and were in the same class—and there was nobody else in the class but those two. Henry, who was the most diligent scholar, was at the head of the class—and Jack was below him—and, of course, as there were only two, he was at the foot.
"One day there was company at the house—and one of the ladies asked the boys how they got along at school. Jack immediately said, 'Very well. I'm next to the head of my class!' The lady then praised him—and said that he must be a very good scholar to be so high in his class. Then she asked Henry how high he was in his class. He said he was 'next to the foot.'
"The lady was somewhat surprised, for she, as well as the others present, supposed that Henry was the best scholar; they were all a little puzzled too, for Henry looked a little sportive and sly when he said it. But just then the teacher came in—and she explained the case; for she said that the boys were in the same class—and they were all that were in it; so that Henry, who was really at the head, was next one to the foot; while Jack, who was at the foot, was next but one to the head. On having this explanation made to the company, Jack felt very much confused and ashamed, while Henry, though he said nothing, could not help feeling pleased.
"And now," asks the mother, in conclusion, "which of these boys do you think came off the best?"
Johnny answers that Henry came out best.
"Yes," adds his mother, "and it is always better that people's merits, if they have any, should come out in other ways than by their own boasting of them."
It is true that this case of Henry and Jack does not correspond exactly—not even nearly, in fact—with that of Johnny and his cousin. Nor is it necessary that the instruction given in these ways should logically conform to the incident which calls them forth. It is sufficient that there should be such a degree of analogy between them, that the interest and turn of thought produced by the incident may prepare the mind for appreciating and receiving the lesson. But the mother may bring the lesson nearer if she pleases.
"I will tell you another story," she says. "There were two men at a fair. Their names were Thomas and Philip.
"Thomas was boasting of his strength. He said he was a great deal stronger than Philip. 'Perhaps you are,' said Philip. Then Thomas pointed to a big stone which was lying upon the ground—and dared Philip to try which could throw it the farthest. 'Very well,' said Philip, 'I will try—but I think it very likely you will beat me, for I know you are very strong.' So they tried—and it proved that Philip could throw it a great deal farther than Thomas could. Then Thomas went away looking very much incensed and very much ashamed, while Philip's triumph was altogether greater for his not having boasted."
The mother may, if she pleases, come still nearer than this, if she wishes to suit Johnny's individual case, without exciting any resistance in his heart to the reception of her lesson. She may bring his exact case into consideration, provided she changes the names of the actors, so that Johnny's mind may be relieved from the uneasy sensitiveness which it is so natural for a child to feel when his own conduct is directly the object of unfavorable comment. It is surprising how slight a change in the mere outward incidents of an affair will suffice to divert the thoughts of the child from himself in such a case—and enable him to look at the lesson to be imparted without personal feeling—and so to receive it more readily.
Johnny's mother may say, "There might be a story in a book about two boys that were disputing a little about which was the tallest. What do you think would be good names for the boys, if you were making up such a story?"
When Johnny has proposed the names, his mother could go on and give an almost exact narrative of what took place between Johnny and his cousin, offering just such instructions and such advice as she would like to offer; and she will find, if she manages the conversation with ordinary tact and discretion, that the lessons which she desires to impart will find a ready admission to the mind of her child, simply from the fact that, by divesting them of all direct personal application, she has eliminated from them the element of covert censure which they would otherwise have contained. Very slight disguises will, in all such cases, be found to be sufficient to veil the personal applicability of the instruction, so far as to divest it of all that is painful or disagreeable to the child. He may have a vague feeling that you mean him—but the feeling will not produce any effect of irritation or repellence.
Now, the object of these illustrations is to show that those errors and faults which, when we look at their real and intrinsic character, we see to be results of ignorance and inexperience—and not instances of willful and intentional wrong-doing, are not to be dealt with harshly—and made occasions of censure and punishment. The child does not deserve censure or punishment in such cases; what he requires is instruction. It is the bringing in of light to illuminate the path that is before him which he has yet to tread—and not the infliction of pain, to impress upon him the evil of the missteps he made, in consequence of the obscurity, in the path behind him.
Indeed, in such cases as this, it is the influence of pleasure rather than pain—that the parent will find the most efficient means of aiding him; that is, in these cases, the more pleasant and agreeable the modes by which he can impart the needed knowledge to the child—in other words, the more attractive he can make the paths by which he can lead his little charge onward in its progress towards maturity—the more successful he will be.
'Ignorance of Material Properties and Laws.'
In the example already given, the mental immaturity consisted in imperfect acquaintance with the qualities and the action of the mind—and the principles of sound reasoning. But a far larger portion of the mistakes and failures into which children fall—and for which they incur undeserved censure, are due to their ignorance of the laws of external nature—and of the properties and qualities of material objects.
A boy, for example, seven or eight years old, receives from his father a present of a knife, with a special injunction to be careful of it. He is, accordingly, very careful of it in respect to such dangers as he understands—but in attempting to bore a hole with it in a piece of wood, out of which he is trying to make a windmill, he breaks the small blade. The accident, in such a case, is not to be attributed to any censurable carelessness—but to lack of instruction in respect to the strength of such a material as steel—and the nature and effects of the degree of tempering given to knife-blades. The boy had seen his father bore holes with a gimlet—and the knife-blade was larger—in one direction at least, that is, in breadth—than the gimlet—and it was very natural for him to suppose that it was stronger. What a boy needs in such a case, therefore, is not a scolding, or punishment—but simply information.
'The Intention good'.
A girl of about the same age—a farmer's daughter, we will suppose—under the influence of a dutiful desire to aid her mother in preparing the table for breakfast, attempts to carry across the room a pitcher of milk which is too full—and she spills a portion of it upon the floor.
The mother, forgetting the good intention which prompted the act—and thinking only of the inconvenience which it occasions her, administers at once a sharp rebuke. The cause of the trouble was, simply, that the child was not old enough to understand the laws of momentum and of oscillation which affect the condition of a fluid when subjected to movements more or less irregular. She has had no theoretical instruction on the subject—and is too young to have acquired the necessary knowledge practically, by experience or observation.
It is so with a very large portion of the accidents which befall children. They arise not from any evil design, nor even anything that can properly be called carelessness, on their part—but simply from the immaturity of their knowledge in respect to the properties and qualities of the material objects with which they have to deal.
It is true that children may be—and often, doubtless, are, in fault for these accidents. The boy may have been warned by his father not to attempt to bore with his knife-blade, or the girl forbidden to attempt to carry the milk-pitcher. The fault, however, would be, even in these cases, in the disobedience—and not in the damage that accidentally resulted from it. And it would be far more reasonable and proper to reprove and punish the fault when no evil followed, than when a damage was the result; for in the latter case the damage itself acts, ordinarily, as a more than sufficient punishment.
'Misfortunes befalling Men'.
These cases are exactly analogous to a large class of accidents and calamities which happen among men. A ship-master sails from port at a time when there are causes existing in the condition of the atmosphere—and in the agencies in readiness to act upon it, that must certainly, in a few hours, result in a violent storm. He is consequently caught in the gale—and his topmasts and upper rigging are carried away. The owners do not censure him for the loss which they incur, if they are only assured that the meteorological knowledge at the captain's command at the time of leaving port was not such as to give him warning of the danger; and provided, also, that his knowledge was as advanced as could reasonably be expected from the opportunities which he had enjoyed. But we are very much inclined to hold children responsible for as much knowledge of the sources of danger around them as we ourselves, with all our experience, have been able to acquire—and are accustomed to condemn and sometimes even to punish them, for lack of this knowledge.
Indeed, in many cases, both with children and with men, the means of knowledge in respect to the danger may be fully within reach—and yet the situation may be so novel—and the combination of circumstances so peculiar—that the connection between the causes and the possible evil effects does not occur to the minds of the people engaged. An accident which has just occurred at the time of this present writing will illustrate this. A company of workmen constructing a tunnel for a railway, when they had reached the distance of some miles from the entrance, prepared a number of charges for blasting the rock—and accidentally laid the wires connected with the powder, in too close proximity to the temporary railway-track already laid in the tunnel. The charges were intended to be fired from an electric battery provided for the purpose; but a thunder-cloud came up—and the electric force from it was conveyed by the rails into the tunnel and exploded the charges—and several men were killed. No one was inclined to censure the unfortunate men for carelessness in not guarding against a contingency so utterly unforeseen by them, though it is plain that, as is often said to children in precisely analogous cases, they 'might have known'.
'Children's Studies'.—'Spelling'.
There is, perhaps, no department of the management of children in which they incur more undeserved censure—and even punishment—and are treated with so little consideration for faults arising solely from the immaturity of their minds, than in the direction of what may be called school studies. Few people have any proper appreciation of the enormous difficulties which a child has to encounter in learning to read and spell. How many parents become discouraged—and manifest their discouragement and dissatisfaction to the child in reproving and complaints, at what they consider his slow progress in learning to spell—forgetting that in the English language there are in common, every-day use eight or ten thousand words, almost all of which are to be learned separately, by a bare and cheerless toil of committing to memory, with comparatively little definite help from the sound. We have ourselves become so accustomed to seeing the word 'bear', for example, when denoting the animal, spelled 'b e a r', that we are very prone to imagine that there is something naturally appropriate in those letters and in that collocation of them, to represent that sound when used to denote that idea. But what is there in the nature and power of the letters to aid the child in perceiving—or, when told, in remembering—whether, when referring to the animal, he is to write 'bear', or 'bare', or 'bair', or 'bayr', or 'bere', as in 'where'. So with the word 'you.' It seems to us the most natural thing in the world to spell it 'y o u'. And when the little pupil, judging by the sound, writes it 'y u', we mortify him by our ridicule, as if he had done something in itself absurd. But how is he to know, except by the hardest, most meaningless—and distasteful toil of the memory, whether he is to write 'you', or 'yu', or 'yoo,' or 'ewe', or 'yew', or 'yue', as in 'flue', or even 'yo' as in 'do'—and to determine when and in what cases respectively he is to use those different forms?
The truth is, that each elementary sound that enters into the composition of words is represented in our language by so many different combinations of letters, in different cases, that the child has very little clue from the sound of a syllable, to guide him in the spelling of it. We ourselves, from long habit, have become so accustomed to what we call the right spelling—which, of course, means nothing more than the customary one—that we are apt to imagine, as has already been said, that there is some natural fitness in it; and a mode of representing the same sound, which in one case seems natural and proper, in another appears ludicrous and absurd. We smile to see 'laugh' spelled 'larf,' just as we should to see 'scarf' spelled 'scaugh', or 'scalf', as in 'half'; and we forget that this perception of apparent incongruity is entirely the result of long habit in us—and has no natural foundation—and that children cannot be sensible of it, or have any idea of it whatever. They learn, in learning to talk—what sound serves as the name by which the drops of water that they find upon the grass in the morning is denoted—but they can have no clue whatever to guide them in determining which of the various modes by which precisely that sound is represented in different words, as 'dew, do, due, du, doo' and 'dou', is to be employed in this case—and they become involved in hopeless perplexity if they attempt to imagine "'how it ought to be spelled';" and we think them stupid because they cannot extricate themselves from the difficulty on our calling upon them to "think!"
No doubt there is a reason for the particular mode of spelling each particular word in the language—but that reason is hidden in the past history of the word and in facts connected with its origin and derivation from some barbarous or dead language—and is as utterly beyond the reach of each generation of spellers—as if there were no such reasons in existence. There cannot be the slightest help in any way from the exercise of the thinking or the reasoning powers.
It is true that the variety of the modes by which a given sound may be represented is not so great in all words as it is in these examples, though with respect to a vast number of the words in common use the above are fair specimens. They were not specially selected—but were taken almost at random. And there are very few words in the language, the sound of which might not be represented by several different modes.
Take, for example, the three last words of the last sentence, which, as the words were written without any thought of using them for this purpose, may be considered, perhaps, as a fair specimen of words taken actually at random. The sound of the word 'several' might be expressed in perfect accordance with the usage of English spelling, as 'ceveral, severul, sevaral, cevural'—and in many other different modes. The combinations 'dipherant, diferunt, dyfferent, diffurunt'—and many others, would as well represent the sound of the second word as the usual mode. And so with 'modes', which, according to the analogy of the language, might as well be expressed by 'moads, mowdes, moades, mohdes', or even 'mhodes', as in 'Rhodes'.
An exceptionally precise speaker might doubtless make some slight difference in the sounds indicated by the different modes of representing the same syllable as given above; but to the ordinary appreciation of childhood, the distinction in sound between such combinations, for example, as 'a n t' in 'constant' and 'e n t' in 'different' would not be perceptible.
Now, when we consider the obvious fact that the child has to learn mechanically, without any principles whatever to guide him in discovering which, out of the many different forms, equally probable, judging simply from analogy, by which the sound of the word is to be expressed, is the right one; and considering how small a portion of his time each day is or can be devoted to this work—and that the number of words in common use, all of which he is expected to know how to spell correctly by the time that he is twelve or fifteen years of age, is probably ten or twelve thousand (there are in Webster's dictionary, considerably over a hundred thousand); when we take these considerations into account, it would seem that a parent, on finding that a letter written by his daughter, twelve or fourteen years of age, has all but three or four words spelled right, ought to be pleased and satisfied—and to express his satisfaction for the encouragement of the learner, instead of appearing to think only of the few words that are wrong—and disheartening and discouraging the child by attempts to make her ashamed of her spelling.
The case is substantially the same with the enormous difficulties to be encountered in learning to read and to write. The names of the letters, as the child pronounces them individually, give very little clue to the sound that is to be given to the word formed by them. Thus, the letters 'h i t', as the child pronounces them individually—'aitch,' 'eye,' 'tee'—would naturally spell to him some such word as 'achite', not 'hit' at all.
And as for the labor and difficulty of writing, a mother who is impatient at the slow progress of her children in the attainment of the art would be aided very much in obtaining a just idea of the difficulties which they experience by sitting upon a chair and at a table both much too high for her—and trying to copy Chinese characters by means of a hair-pencil—and with her left hand—the work to be closely inspected every day by a stern Chinaman of whom she stands in dread—and all the minutest deviations from the copy pointed out to her attention with an air of dissatisfaction and reproval!
'Effect of Ridicule'.
There is, perhaps, no one cause which exerts a greater influence in chilling the interest which children naturally feel in the acquisition of knowledge, than the depression and discouragement which result from having their mistakes and errors—for a large portion of which they are in no sense to blame—made subjects of censure or ridicule. The effect is still more decided in the case of girls than in that of boys, the gentler gender being naturally so much more sensitive. I have found in many cases, especially in respect to girls who are far enough advanced to have had a tolerably full experience of the usual influences of schools, that the fear of making mistakes—and of being "thought stupid," has had more effect in hindering and retarding progress, by repressing the natural ardor of the pupil—and destroying all alacrity and courage in the efforts to advance, than all other causes combined.
'Stupidity'.
How unkind—and even cruel—it is to reproach or ridicule a child for stupidity, is evident when we reflect that any supposed inferiority in his mental organization cannot, by any possibility, be 'his' fault. The question what degree of natural intelligence he shall be endowed with, in comparison with other children, is determined, not by himself—but by his Creator—and depends, probably, upon conditions of organization in his cerebral system as much beyond his control as anything abnormal in the features of his face, or blindness, or deafness, or any other physical disadvantage. The child who shows any indications of inferiority in any of these respects—should be the object of his parent's or his teacher's special tenderness and care. If he is near-sighted, give him, at school, a seat as convenient as possible to the blackboard. If he is hard of hearing, place him near the teacher; and for reasons precisely analogous, if you suspect him to be of inferior mental capacity, help him gently and tenderly in every possible way. Do everything in your power to encourage him—and to conceal his deficiencies both from others and from himself, so far as these objects can be attained consistently with the general good of the family or of the school.
And, at all events, let those who have in any way the charge of children, keep the distinction well defined in their minds—between the faults which result from evil intentions, or deliberate and willful neglect of known duty—and those which, whatever the inconvenience they may occasion, are in part or in whole the results of mental or physical immaturity. In all our dealings, whether with plants, or animals, or with the human soul, we ought, in our training, to act very gently in respect to all that pertains to the natural condition.
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