Page:The Folk-Lore Journal Volume 1 1883.djvu/266



F all the proverbs on the earth, "Train up a child in the way he should go" is the one which would seem to admit of the least doubt as to its meaning. We all of us know the way—we have trodden it ourselves; we all of us know the child—our neighbour's, if not our own. Yet seldom has there been a more complete transformation than that which the interpretation of this proverb has undergone in the last decade of years. The educators of Tom Tulliver and Tom Brown knew of only one subject of instruction, and only one method of teaching it. Their type of a scholar was Mr. Casaubon; beyond the Greek and Latin classics they knew of no education, and attempted none. But educators are now beginning to see that their duty is not to merely impart instruction in some one subject, valuable though that subject may be, but to call forth the varied capacities of the young minds; not to mould all children in one and the same branch of study, but to train the faculties for the performance of the various functions that the members of a highly-developed society are required to discharge. The ideal of the new educator is Mr. Phœbus, the Aryan.

But this progress to a higher interpretation of the 'way' brings with it a revelation of our ignorance of the 'child.' We begin to see how little we really know of a child's mind, its capacity, its direction, and rate of growth, the lines of least resistance into it for each element of instruction. Yet a knowledge of all these things is an indispensable pre-requisite for a competent educator, and therefore it is little wonder that a systematic investigation is being made into the problem, What is a child? The inquiries that have to be made travel into regions already occupied by various groups of researchers,