Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 68.djvu/446

 442 taint. Thirdly, the teacher must know what sort of individual will best succeed as a member of society. This is an innovation; it is but a few years since teachers began to plan the adult the child is to be. But in order to plan an individual who shall be in harmony with his environment when he becomes an adult, the teacher must have an intimate knowledge and insight into the cumulative nature of the environment and the dynamic changes which society in all of its functionings and attitudes continually undergoes.

The first two of these essential qualifications of the teacher were first pointed out in a vital way by Rousseau, but he had no conception of the gravity of the third. Rousseau believed that the various tendencies and instincts as they appeared in the child were cues to what the normal individual should be, and should be seized upon in the educational process and made by habituation a permanent characteristic of the adult. Rousseau's ideas of 'returning to nature' were exemplified in his theory of teaching, and the result of such teaching was portrayed in Emile. This character is in the true sense savage. Not having fallen heir to his spiritual inheritance, he is a babe in his comprehension of the world. With never a passion curbed, he has no power of self-denial, and is blown about by every whim and caprice. Rousseau would observe the child in order that he may not overlook any of these tendencies as they appear. We have an entirely different motive in child observation. These instincts and tendencies are not to us indices of what the adult should be, but we study them and note their order of appearance in order that we may be enabled to exercise greater economy and efficiency in the teaching process. Our ideal is to exercise no faculty nor attempt its development until it naturally begins to function in the child's development. If such instinct or tendency is not a desirable characteristic of the adult the educator plans, then he needs to be most careful to inhibit its exercise. Most instincts are transient, and if given no chance to be exercised, and, consequently, to be developed into habits, they will die out, and it is as if they never existed. Instincts afford a wide range of possibilities for the educator to select from in developing the individual whose foundations for manhood he is laying.

When an instinct was allowed to die by not being given provocation to function, that which it would have secured for the individual is to a considerable extent beyond the possibility of acquisition later. For example, when the play instinct appears and the child is not allowed to play, or the play propensities are not called into activity, which is sometimes the case where there is but one child in a family, and where the parents are old and the child is tied, so to speak, to the mother's apron strings, that child, no matter what may be his social advantages later, will never be able to acquire that social poise which the other