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CHI-HOANG-TI

384

CHILD-STUDY

Chi=hoang=ti, one of the greatest emperors of China, who ruled from 246 to 210 B. C. It was he who, by his military successes, formed the eight kingdoms then making up China into one great empire. He further extended the empire so that under him it came to be about as large as it is now. He was also the builder of the great Chinese wall.

Chihuahua (che-wa'wa), the largest state of Mexico, adjoining New Mexico and Texas, covers 87,802 square miles and is about as large as Idaho. In the east is a large desert of sand; the south and west are mountainous; and there are many rivers. Its silver mines were for centuries the richest in Mexico. Its capital, Chihuahua, rises like an oasis in the desert among roses and orange-groves. Founded in 1691 it housed a hundred years ago 80,000 people. Population of the state, 405,265.

Child, Lydia Maria, American author and, with Wm. Lloyd Garrison, a zealous advocate of slavery abolition, was born at Medford, Mass., Feb. n, 1802, and died at Wayland, Mass., Oct. 20, 1880. Early in the thirties, some few years after her marriage, she and her husband (David Lee Child) took an active interest in the subject of American slavery, against which she made many stirring appeals, both in her novels and in a periodical which she afterward edited, the National Anti-Slavery Standard. Her writings greatly contributed to the formation of public opinion adverse to the holding of slaves; while she aided the cause she had at heart by supporting schools for the negroes, helping freedmen and giving of her bounty to the Union soldiers in the Civil War. Her writings include The Rebels; a novel, Hobomok; Fact and Fiction; The American Frugal Housewife; Looking Toward Sunset and The Progress of Religious Ideas.

ChiId=Study. Early philosophers and psychologists, notably Plato and Aristotle, nave occasionally commented on phases of child-life, but the systematic study of the mental and physical nature of children has been reserved for modern and, indeed, quite recent times. The subject was first approached from the point of view of the educator. Among many others Comenius, Rousseau and Pestalozzi were strenuous in insisting on the vital importance of a study of children to the one who expects to teach them. All these writers emphasized the need of beginning education with an appeal to the senses. Only in this way, they declare, can the reason and the judgment ultimately be reached. Rousseau, the enthusiastic advocate of nature, was especially interested in the child, at any rate in the theoretical child, as one expressing the purely natural in its naive spontaneity. He would have the education of the child consist largely

in permitting it to develop in a natural and untrammeled way. This idea, antagonistic to the earlier religious one of the total depravity of the child, was, in spite of some limitations, the inspiration of the greater part of modern educational reform.

Herbart, whose educational theory turns about the notion of apperception (q. v.), requires of a teacher a very careful study of the contents of the child's mind and also of those diseases, temperamental variations and emotions that are likely to interfere with successful learning. It will be noticed that he does not advocate child-study as a means of discovering those instincts, the proper development of which constitutes the aim of education. This point of view, suggested by Rousseau, it was left to Froebel and more recent students of children to develop. On the other hand, Herbart did point out the great importance of studying the minds of children and of men by observation and experiment instead of by introspection and speculation. This improvement in method has been responsible for a large part of the results of recent child-study.

Froebel derived is view of the aim and material of education from his sympathetic philosophy of the nature of the child. From the point of view of the development of child-study, his most interesting conception is that the child in his evolution passes through or recapitulates the same series, of steps that has been traversed by the race in its evolution. This idea was not original with him but was derived on the one hand from philosophers like Lessing, who were emphasizing, as against Rousseau, the value of historic culture to the individual, and on the other from biologists like Von Baer, who had discovered that the embryo of any higher tvpe of animal passes through stages in which it resembles the embryos of lower types down to the very simplest. This notion of recapitulation has been applied to education in two forms. The first is that of the culture-epoch theory, developed by Ziller, one of the followers of Herbart. According to this view the course of study should be so arranged that the child will first take up the study of primitive life and culutre, and then deal successively with more and more advanced types of civilization. Courses of study arranged on this plan were expected to appeal most successfully to the interests and powers of the child. This contention has not been entirely justified, but the culture-epoch theory remains to-day a most valuable clue to the interests of children. The second application of the theory of recapitulation to education is found in the notion that the various instincts appear in the child in much the same order that they