OJ v.10 no.8-9 REMOTE STORAGE THE OHIO EDUCATIONAL MONTHLY: A Journal of School and Home Education. AUGUST, 1861. Old Series, Vol. X. No. 8. New Series, Vol. II, No. 8. THE INSTRUCTION OF LITTLE CHILDREN. [This article, from a thoroughly metaphysical pen, presents the philosophy of primary instruction in a vigorous and lucid manner. name, leaving his essay to speak for itself.—Ens.]` The author withholds his A child being committed to the care of a teacher, the cardinal question is: How shall knowledge be so imparted as to ensure the symmetrical unfolding of its powers? A child is a complex being, organized by life, in depth and subtlety the most mysterious that exists in creation. But all life involves growth; all growth proceeds according to fixed laws: therefore, the unfolding of a child depends upon knowing, at once comprehensively and thoroughly, those fundamental facts in its being which constitute the Laws of Life. Setting down, as our primary postulate, that the foremost object of all instruction is to secure the increase of pure power in all that is immortal in man; that is, that all culture is to be estimated upon the scale of the child's entire vocation in the universe, we shall endeavor briefly to state the Laws of Childhood, and the canons of instruction flowing therefrom. In every child, the elementary facts are these: One life, soul in body, spirit in matter; one self, that can know, can have man. pleasure or pain in what it knows, can choose or refuse this or that reality known and associated with emotions either pleasurable or painful. A self, moreover, that in knowing is capable of being revealed to by those realities which exist merely in the material universe, are transitory, particular, and the objects of the senses; capable also of being revealed to by the realities. existing in God, immutable, generic, and wholly above the senses; capable, again, of beholding these unsensuous conceptions reproduced in an image, not existent but possible, yet as particular as if existent: which capability we call Imagination; capable, finally, of beholding all realities in system, of having revelation of the coherences of truth, of relations, and of causes. Now, in the child, because its state of being is germinal, the interdependence of these elementary facts is quite different from that in the ripened In the child, the vital predominates over the spiritual, sense over reason, and feeling over the will. The capacity of being revealed to by the objects of sense, and the class of emotions dependent upon it, are equally and vigorously prominent: in a word, the powers of observation are in the keenest activity. See how this little fellow, before it can speak, stretches its tiny hands after the bright golden ring on its mother's finger. It must touch it, feel of it all over, taste of it, smell of it, find how different is the sensation of the gold, on its fingers, in its palm, on the delicate skin of its face; it is bent on knowing it through and through. Give it a blossom, it will pick it to pieces. When it grows older, it pulls its first primer into shreds, inspecting these most curiously, thus proving that it knows much better how to use it than the maker, whose pious feelings are shocked at such destruction. So the intense restleness of children, their incessant goings hither and thither, turning upside down this thing then that, are all the outcome of the urgency to see all that is to be seen, to hear all that is to be heard; and the completeness and accuracy with which they often do this work, is wonderful to one who has not many times watched them. Moreover, as the power of dealing with the objects of sense is thus prominent over that of dealing with conceptions, so also is the Imagination: which presents the conception, latent and unconscious, as a living, individual thing, and is to the abstract conception as color is to light. Meanwhile, the power of behold ing realities in system, of viewing relations, combining truth, is yet in abeyance, and is to be gradually awakened by such an exhibition of abstract conceptions, given by means of concrete facts properly combined, as accords with the processes of Nature in giving truth to the child, and of God in the civilization of mankind. For everywhere in the culture of man the law holds: From the particular to the general; through the concrete to the abstract. Guided by this principle, and recalling the peculiar adjustment of the human powers as above shown to belong to childhood, we may state the method of imparting knowledge to a child in the following specifications: In reference to the controlling facts that are true of every child alike, the teacher must proceed in his work: 1. By conveying the elementary concepts in every science, through the instrumentality of its concrete facts. For while it must evermore be remembered that the ultimate object, in the intellect of manhood, is the beholding of conception, and the nearer and nearer approximation to its exhaustive comprehension, it must also be remembered that, in the child, the super-sensuous vision has scarce manifested itself; that all the child's natural outgoings are towards what it can see and hear and touch. Grant, as from the predominance of sense on the one hand, and of the imagination on the other, we must without dispute, that the staple of the child's training is to be elementary Natural History, taken as including all the prominent facts of the material world, Drawing, Empirical Geometry, and the primary conception of God, as given in nature and in the history of Christ; each to be taught orally or visually; Natural History as addressing the proneness to sensuous knowledge; Drawing as securing guidance and completeness in observation; Geometry, as giving culture to the sense perception of figure, and definite objects to the reproductive Imagination; God in nature and the history of Christ, as the first realm of action for the Imagination in its highest function; grant this, and the application of the law, from the concrete to the abstract, is at once apparent. For a child does not state a conception to itself as a conception. It sees a house, and thereupon has immediate intuition of the conception house; for it is able to recognize all houses thereafter, and what is this but the recognition, albeit unconscious, of their eternal archetype?—but it cannot give any |