Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 49.djvu/516

496 of concrete sentiment, bundles of desire. In the majority of our schools we try to crush this all out. What we should do is to encourage it. If we are sympathetic, if we are responsive, if we are wise, we will hesitate to check this flood of feeling. It is to be disciplined, but not destroyed. It is the same with the multiform desires of childhood. Many of them can not be gratified, but the child-life will be fuller and more wholesome if they are allowed as far as may be. And I so value this emotional life, this prodigality of sentiment and desire, because it all leads to action, and to the very sort of action that is educationally the most valuable—to that which is self-prompted. Froebel hit upon this in the kindergarten, and made self-activity the corner stone of his whole system. He could not have built truer. It is a quality found in all children. Those who are full-blooded and have not been constantly thwarted by the cry of "Don't!" have an inexhaustible supply of it, and this is precisely what we want. It is the source of power, and jealously to be guarded. The particular merit of the new education, represented by the kindergarten, sloyd and manual training, lies in this, that they proceed psychologically. They recognize the child's desire as the source of action and effort, and build upon that. What we want to do is to turn these desires into the most wholesome channels, and to have the activity spend itself along the most helpful lines. So long as the desire is genuine, is the child's very own, and the activity which follows, a legitimate result of the desire, we may feel quite sure of the resulting sensations and their assembly into thought. What I dread most as a teacher is the child devoid of feeling and desire, the quiet little mouse who under the old régime would be called good and held up as a pattern. To keep quiet and vegetate is not to be good. The troublesome child, full of action and desire, is the far more promising bit of humanity. In the first there is nothing to work upon, poor little anæmic creatures with no past, no present, and no probable future. But the second is a storehouse of power. Education has something to work upon. It has a more lively problem, it is true, and one of some difficulty, but withal a problem of keen interest and large promise. Believing this as strongly as I do, the systems of education which begin by repression, by a process of subduing, quieting, deadening the activities and desires of childhood, seem to me absolutely vicious—more vicious by far than the conduct of nurses who feed troublesome babies with soothing sirups and other detestable drugs to put them to sleep.

The children themselves suggest the right method in education. What they most want is to be employed, and with something that interests them, not something that interests mamma or papa or the teacher. Consult any child of your acquaintance