Parent and Child Vol. III., Child Study and Training - Mosiah Hall
When I was a child I used to hear that Nature was bad, and we used to have
sermons to the natural man. They were excellent sermons, too, but they
ought to have been preached to the unnatural man. The natural child was
considered a child of wrath, and, having that reputation, he quite
frequently lived up to it; but Nature is beneficient, as long as we let her
be so, and she is always working toward great and grand ends. She has been
working towards a higher and nobler and a better race of men than you and I
are to-day. She is working for a race of men and women who shall tower
above us as the sages and prophets in Athens and Jerusalem towered above
their slaves. Can we not trust her just a little?
Did you ever think that it is the most marvelous thing in the world that
such a thing as a chicken ever comes out of such a thing as an egg? If only
one chicken were hatched in a century, we would go from here to the
Himalaya mountains to see the miracle of that chicken coming out of that
egg. You put an egg under a very stupid old hen, and all the hen does is to
keep that egg warm, and leave it alone; after twenty days there comes out a
chicken. How in the world did that chicken ever frame that body? How did it
build the skeleton and string the muscles, and spin the nerves? If every
nerve in that body did not make just the right connection, that chicken
would be paralyzed. If you could watch the development of that chicken in
the egg, your hair would stand on end. Isn't it Nature that makes those
chickens? You and I can't make them. Nature puts a shell around the egg
with the express purpose that we are to keep our fingers out and let her
alone. She says: "I am on very important business now and I am going to do
some strange things; if you could watch me you would interfere with me, and
if you interfere with me, you will ruin me or ruin the chicken, so I want
you to stand to one side and leave me entirely alone; and while I might do
a good many things that you don't like, I shall bring a chicken out of that
egg;" and she does; she has been making them for thousands of years in that
same old stupid way, but she brings the chicken out all right.
Sometimes she seems to blunder still worse. She takes an egg which we
suppose is going to turn into a frog, and she brings out of it a
tadpole--neither fish, flesh nor fowl nor anything else. After a while the
tadpole gets legs and has a long tail; it must lose that tail in order to
become a frog. A benevolent zoologist one day started in to help the
tadpole by snipping off the tadpole's tail; he made a frog of him in a
hurry, but the strange thing was that that frog never was able to leap
properly. Nature had been relying on the material that was in the tail. She
was going to shift it forward and put it in the hind legs, but when the
zoologist cut it off, she couldn't build the hind legs right after that.
A good deal of our education seems to me like trying to make frogs in a
hurry by cutting off their tails. Nature can make chickens; she can make
frogs. She can make bugs that will eat up everything which human ingenuity
ever tried to raise. She will make weeds which you and I can't possibly
kill even though we fight against them all summer long. We can trust Nature
to form these things; isn't it fair to trust her with the children for a
little while at least? Wouldn't it be well--I never heard of this
experiment being tried, but I should like to see it tried very much
indeed--I do wish that sometime somebody would leave a baby alone for
twenty minutes and see what it would do if it were left to itself.
What is the great characteristic of all living things? It is that they
grow; we cannot make them grow, but they grow of themselves. The farmer
plants his crop of corn. He doesn't get a jackscrew and put under every
hill of corn, and go around every morning and give the screw a turn and a
twist and hoist the hill up in the air. He prepares the soil as best he
can. He puts in the seed; he keeps down the weeds; he keeps out things and
living beings which will injure the crop as far as he can; then he leaves
it alone to God and Nature to make that corn grow, and in time he gets a
bountiful harvest.
I believe that education some day will be somewhat like raising a crop of
corn. We shall learn to keep the child under the best condition possible.
We shall learn to keep down harmful and injurious surroundings or forces so
far as they can interfere with him. We shall stimulate growth in every
possible way; that I grant you; and when we have done that, we shall leave
the rest calmly to Nature and to the good Lord who made that child for some
good purpose.
It is a grand thing to have the child learn to see for himself the glories
of this magnificent world. I verily believe that when you and I go home,
while the good Lord will be very merciful with us because of our sins, I
don't see how he can forgive many of us for not having had a great deal
better time in this glorious world in which He has put us. When you open
the child's eyes to the beauties and the glories of Nature you have done a
great thing for it. But, after all, that is not the grandest thing to my
mind. The grandest part is that every wave of vibration that goes in
through the eyes as the child looks at Nature, and pours into the brain,
stimulates that brain to a larger growth than it would otherwise possibly
have attained, and the child is a larger and a grander child for that
Nature study.
We believe in manual training because it gives us skilled fingers and
enables us to do deftly and well a great many things which we otherwise
could not do at all, and which most of us men have to go to our wives and
ask them to do for us. But that is not the grandest part of manual
training; the grandest part is the reaction from the finger upon the brain,
stimulating the brain to realize all its ideals, and stimulating it so
that whenever it sees good work of any kind in this world it shall
appreciate it heartily and enjoy it with the joy of the artist.
We speak of physical training and physical training is brain training in
the end, it is training in growth. It is very evident, however, that the
growth and development of a baby is something different from the growth and
development of a child; and the growth in the child is very different from
that in the youth and that of the youth from that of the adult. In the baby
the vital organs are growing faster. In the young child the muscular system
is coming to the front, and he runs and plays and through the stimulus of
that muscular exercise he brings out every organ in the body and gains that
magnificent health which he so much needs.
Then, after a time, the brain comes to the front and grows and develops
more rapidly than any other part of the body. Our business as teachers is
always so to stimulate, by proper exercise, the growing organs that they
shall grow faster and further than they ever could without our aid. We are
not to always hasten it. This is one thing we must bear in mind: precocity
is the worst foe of a sound education. It is the boy and the girl who
mature slowly but mature surely that in the end possess the earth. We must
not hasten the process, but when we find the organ is ready to grow and
develop, then we must give it adequate stimulus. In other words, the
stimulus must be of the right kind, and there must be just enough of it,
just enough blood to stimulate the muscles, just as much study as will best
stimulate the growing and very immature intellectual centers in the brain.
Then we will increase the stimulus as the power increases and demands the
stronger exercise, and so stimulating the growing parts by adequate
exercise, we bring one part after another up to such development that we
have one harmonious whole of perfect health.
You remember that when the old deacon in Oliver Wendell Holmes' poem
started in to build the one-horse shay, he said, "Every shay that has ever
been made has broken down, because there was always a weakest spot in it;
now I am going to make a shay that never will break down, because I am
going to make the weakest part just as strong as the rest." We cannot
always do that, but if we can make that part somewhere near as strong as
the rest, we are past masters in education.
If we obey Nature's laws, all of her powers will be on our side; and with
all her powers on our side and the very stars in their courses fighting for
us, we cannot possibly fail, there is absolutely nothing which is
impossible to us. We must be strong and of good courage, if we are to guide
these little people into the land sworn unto their fathers before them.
LESSON I
QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION
1. What is meant by the expression, "Man's partnership with Nature?"
Illustrate how man makes Nature serve him.
2. In what way can man enter into a partnership with Nature regarding his
own body?
3. What can man do best when it comes to making things grow?
4. What do you think of the "hurry" methods in education?
5. What is the most we can do in providing for the education of the child?
6. How does Nature help us in the training process?
7. What does Nature try to make sure of first in the child?
8. When does the brain of the child begin to develop rapidly?
9. What advice would you give about precocity in children? Why?
10. What should we study in our children to give them a strong and even
development?
CONSERVATION OF THE CHILD
_By Dr. J.M. Tyler_
When the good Lord sets out to develop a child, the first organ with which
He starts is the stomach. The stomach is the foundation of all greatness.
It is a matter of daily observation if not of experience that a man can get
along very well with very few brains, but a man can't get along at all
without a good digestive system. The digestive system furnishes all the
material for growth and the fuel which is continually burned or consumed in
our nerves and muscles. Now, any furnace requires besides fuel, a good
draught. When we burn the fuel, by uniting it with the oxygen thus brought
in, we get the energy which draws our locomotives and our great ships.
Similarly in our bodies, our lungs bring in the oxygen and the heart and
blood-vessels carry the fuel and the oxygen to every part of the body. But
every furnace requires a smoke-stack to carry off the waste, and,
similarly, we must have in our bodies an excretory system to remove the
waste of the burned-up material and of the used-up tissue of the heart,
muscles and nerves. This constitutes the digestive system; the lungs, the
excretory system and the circulatory system are absolutely necessary to
support the combustion which is going on in nerve and muscle and without
which energy is impossible.
All productive labor manifests itself through the muscles. Our muscles
directly write the book, speak the word, build the railroads, do the deeds.
Our muscles are of very different ages. In the child the trunk muscles are
developed first; the shoulder muscles next; the arm muscles next; the
finger muscles last of all. The heavy muscles of trunk, shoulder and thigh
require but a small amount of nervous impulse or control, and they react
strongly on all the vital organs, as is shown every time that we take a
walk. The finest and youngest muscles of the fingers require a very large
amount of nervous control for a very small output of muscular energy and
their exercise stimulates the very highest centers in the brain, and this
is the great argument for physical training, that through one muscle or
another you can stimulate and develop as you choose either any vital organ
or the highest center in the brain.
Never forget the maxim of the old German physiologist that "Health comes in
through the muscles and flows out through the nerves." The nervous system
was created for good and wise ends, but in many people it has become a
nuisance. Its use is to insure that every stimulus from the external world
shall call forth a response suited to the emergency. A fly lights upon my
face; I wave my hand and drive him away. The fly has tickled my face; there
is the external stimulus. A sensory impulse travels to the brain or to some
other center and a motor impulse goes from there to a certain muscle in my
arm which moves my hand and drives away the fly. The impulse has called out
a response suited to that emergency. You watch a cat walk across the lawn;
you will think that fool cat is going to fall down, it is going so slowly
and it can hardly raise one foot above the other, but watch it when it sees
its prey; every muscle seems to turn to steel; it is ready for the spring.
When that spring is made there is no energy wasted. After that the cat does
not move for two hours; no wasting energy there. Wasting of energy is a
sin.
I awaken in the morning, and the first horrible emergency of the day
confronts me at once, I have to get up. How I get up I have no idea.
Professor James once said that when a man thinks about it he never does get
up, and that's right; but I find myself in the middle of the floor and that
is all I know, and then the cold air or the sight of my clothes or
something reminds me to start dressing, and the putting on of one garment
leads to the putting on of another. The pangs of hunger call me to the
breakfast table; the bell calls me to work; and so all day long response
follows stimulus; the day's work is a success or a failure according to the
response which I make to the stimuli which I receive.
There is a marvelous picture given in the scripture in the parable of the
poor man going down from Jerusalem to Jericho and getting wounded and left
by the road-side. Three men pass that way. They all see the same thing. The
light is reflected from the poor sufferer into the eyes of these
passers-by; a flood of vibration passes on to the brain and then the motor
impulses go out to the muscles. In the case of the good Samaritan, the
impulse went from the brain or the spinal nerve to the arms and he stooped
down and picked the poor fellow up and carried him off; while in the priest
and the Levite the impulses all went down into the legs and the cowards
hustled off for Jericho.
A healthy nervous system is the rarest thing in this wide world. I have one
illustration in mind, which I always like to think of, which I am going to
give you of a perfectly healthy and normal nervous system. It was possessed
by a good old negro minister. He had been preaching to his congregation for
a long time on the subject of meekness and it had not produced the desired
effect; so he said to them one morning: "Brethren, I'se gwine to give you
the illustration of meekness for a week now and show you what it is," and
the old man did. His congregation naturally rose to the occasion: They
insulted his wife; they abused his children; they stoned his dog; they
stole his chickens; they did everything under the heaven to break down the
meekness of that man; but he went on through the week and came into church
the next Sunday and began to preach. The congregation recognized that their
time was short and they redoubled their efforts, but all in vain. Finally,
about five minutes before the closing of the service, he turned to the
congregation and said: "Brethren, I think I ought to denounce to this
congregation that my week of meekness is just about up, and when the clock
in yonder steeple strikes twelve, I'se gwine to quit preachin', close this
blessed Bible, go down from this pulpit, and then, Brethren, Judgment day
and hell is gwine to break loose on some of you." Now, that old colored
minister had an ideal nervous system. There had not been one single
response all that week long, and not one single stimulus which had come in
from the outside had been lost either, but it was all waiting to leap into
that good right arm when the emergency was to be met, in the fullness of
time, and I commend you to go and do likewise.
It is only a step, thank fortune, from the ridiculous to the sublime, just
as it is only a step from the sublime to the ridiculous. Another
illustration of a perfect nervous system: You remember how our Lord spent a
whole day in preaching, in healing, working deeds of kindness, in pouring
out sympathy and comfort, the strain of which on a man's nervous energy is
worse than anything else in the world, and how at the close of the day He
went into the little boat, took the hard cushion on which the steersman
sat, threw it down in the bottom of the boat, and laid Himself down with
His head on that hard cushion and slept like a child through the rocking of
the boat and the roaring of the storm, until His disciples came to Him
saying, "Lord, save us: we perish." There is not one man in a thousand who
could do that work or could put out one-tenth part of that nervous energy
and then sleep like that. Anybody who thinks that the Prophet of Nazareth
was a weak or a feeble man has made the mistake of his life. He was perfect
physically or He never could have done His work.
All this work of developing a steady nerve, of developing the vital organs
for the use of the muscles, has been going on until the child is nine or
ten years old. It has been going on very rapidly, and in as much as the
exercise has been suitable, as his digestion has been good, his growth has
been very rapid. During the first three years of its life the child
increases its weight more than three-fold. During the next three years it
adds over forty per cent. to this amount and between six and nine adds over
thirty per cent. more; and when the boy is about eleven years old, or the
girl is about ten, then the growth almost stops that year. It drops to a
minimum. I call your attention to this thought: the minimum growth is more
in a girl than in a boy. A girl is always more precocious than a boy. She
is a year older than he at nine or ten, and when she is fourteen, fifteen,
sixteen, she is two years older than the boy. When the girl is ten and the
boy eleven, growth drops to the minimum. Why is that? Nature is economizing
her material and husbanding her resources against the trying years which
are to come.
You remember the story of the time when Pharoah in his dream saw the seven
fat kine followed and devoured by the seven lean kine; he was told that his
dream signified seven years of plenty, to be followed by seven years of
famine, and was advised to store up the harvests of the good years against
the hard times to follow. This is a picture of the child's life. The first
seven years of the child's life are years of plenty, when it is storing up
material for the years of hard trial, the years of famine, which are close
at hand.
I am going to talk most of the girl because she needs more attention than
the boy. Growth is a very expensive process. It begins in the bone. When
the bones lengthen out, then every muscle, every nerve has to be lengthened
out to suit that extra length, and that means a great deal of waste for
that rebuilding, but it is something worse than that. You know perfectly
well that out of the butterfly egg there comes the caterpillar, and that
caterpillar goes into a cocoon, and during the life of the cocoon every
organ is changed there and it comes out a butterfly. That is what we call a
metamorphosis.
The girl between ten and sixteen is undergoing a metamorphosis just as sure
as that caterpillar is undergoing a metamorphosis. If you leave town for a
few years and come back, you know all the old men and women haven't changed
any, except to die off. The babies have grown some; but the boy and the
girl seem to be grown all over again. That is, the girl whom you left at
nine years old and on coming back find her sixteen, has dropped down her
skirts, has drawn up her hair, and that is the butterfly cocoon, and it is
a mighty pretty butterfly cocoon. That is waste again. It is waste, waste,
on all sides and all of that waste is going into the blood, no other place
to put it; it ought to be got out at once. But there is another thing
about it; all the food must be digested, and so oxygen must be gained and
waste must be eliminated. All the organs in the trunk between those ages of
ten and fourteen are relatively both larger and smaller in girls than at
any other period of life.
It looks as though Nature was making a bad blunder, but she is really
making the best of a very bad bargain, doing the best she can under hard
circumstances. With these small vital organs and this tremendous draught on
the body for new material and the large amount of waste to be eliminated,
you are sure to have trouble. That trouble is going to manifest itself
first of all in the blood. The blood is going to be poor blood during those
years, unless you remedy it. Poor blood, first of all, depresses the
nervous system, and the girl feels gloomy and good for nothing; she hates
to go out into the cold air because she chills; yet that cold air is what
she needs more than anything else in the world. She hates to make an effort
and won't take the exercise she needs if she can possibly help it. The
exercise she must have. Her appetite has gone all wrong. She likes to live
on caramels, pickles, and all such things as that. Now, my friends, I want
to tell you, when anything goes wrong with the appetite, then the whole
system goes wrong, remember that. Observations were made some years ago in
Sweden of a number of the bodily disorders that occur between the ages of
thirteen and nineteen. These examiners found that there was one disorder
which attacked, put in general numbers, sixty per cent. of the girls in the
Swedish schools between the ages of thirteen and nineteen, and, indeed, it
never fell below sixty per cent. and was usually a great deal more. In
Denmark, the examination was made in the field where the children are
healthier, and then the figures gave forty per cent. The troubles usually
show themselves in the form of pallor; the girl is pale. They frequently
break out in the form of headache, loss of appetite, resistance to marked
effort and sometimes with a cold. Now, if the seat of the cold is in the
blood, because it is loaded with waste and ought to be removed, there is
one thing sure, that waste never will be removed until it is thoroughly
oxidized. That is the first thing to do, oxidize it. The only way to
oxidize the blood is to get the lungs full of good, pure air.
The girl wants just as much lung capacity as she can possibly get. We find
that the girl during those years is a little taller and a little heavier
than the boy, and she needs more oxygen to every pound of waste in the body
than the boy does, because the waste is going on faster. The average girl
has about three-fourths as much lung capacity for every pound of the waste
in the body, as has the average boy. What the girl needs is more lung
capacity to get in more oxygen. How is she going to get the lung capacity
sitting in the house? How is she going to get it when she is tied down in
the grammar school room with a book before her eyes?
The worst of it all is that the girl leaves off playing games in the open
air just about the time when she needs them the most, and not having the
open air play and the open air games, she can't get the lung capacity and
the oxygen. Another thing that hinders the girl is this: there is no place
for her to play where she can do all she wants to and not have people
looking over the fence and finding fault with her for having a good time.
Every girl ought to have a place where she can play in the open air and not
be bothered and we ought to get more and more games for girls of that age.
Another thing, the exercise should not be too severe. Don't kill a girl
with physical training; because you can kill her that way just as you can
kill her with books. Some of our physical training is too severe for a girl
of that age. She must have plenty of the right kinds of games and they
should be in the open air, and they should be such as she will enjoy and
love; if they are not of that kind it won't help a great deal. If you can
build up lung capacity in that way then you are drawing in the oxygen;
then you are getting out the waste, and you will find the girl will come
out all right in nine cases out of ten.
It is a fact, proved by physical examination, that all during this period
the better scholars have the larger lung capacity. Those of you who have
taught in the grammar schools year after year will know that a bright girl,
one that has been very bright, will have a year when she will come to you
and will be absolutely stupid and can't learn. "What ails the girl?" you
wonder. She will tell you, "I don't know what ails me; I can't learn
anything. I have become a fool and I was not always one." The trouble is
with the lung capacity; it isn't with the brain; the brain is all right. If
you tell that girl to wake up in order to make up that lack of mental
ability by studying harder, you are doing the unpardonable sin. I am
telling it to you straight. That is not the remedy. The remedy is more play
in the open air, then you will find that that girl's brain will clear up.
Many a poor girl has been put in poor condition by being urged to study
hard, when the fault was that nobody knew enough to turn her out into the
fresh air which the Lord intended she should have.