Talks to Sunday school teachers

Preface

This book is in a sense a supplement to The Pupil and the Teacher, as it is my response to the request that I write in fuller and more concrete detail concerning certain topics briefly referred to in that book.

It has, however, a body of its own, and is published in the hope that parents and Sunday school teachers may be helped by these talks to gain further insight into the psychology of boys and girls and a better understanding of some of the pedagogical problems involved in their religious education. That it may be the better available for use by teacher-training or parents' classes, or as a basis for a series of Sunday school workers' conferences, questions for discussion and a brief bibliography are appended to each chapter.

Thanks are due for permission to publish in this form, to The Teachers' Monthly, The Augsburg Sunday School Teacher, The Sunday School Worker, The Sunday School Magazine, The Pilgrim Magazine, The Evangelical Teacher, and The Pilgrim Elementary Teacher, in which these articles originally appeared. I owe an especial acknowledgment to the Reverend J. M. Duncan, vi PREFACE

D.D., Editor of the Sunday school publications of the Presbyterian Church in Canada, at whose request they were written.

Contents

CHAPTER PAGE

I The Child as a Discoverer . n

II A Bundle of Instincts .... 18

CHAPTER I THE CHILD AS A DISCOVERER Who can tell what a baby thinks?

Who can follow the gossamer links

By which the manikin feels his way Out from the shore of the great unknown, Blind, and wailing, and alone,

Into the light of day?

What does he think of his mother's eyes?

What does he think of his mother's hair? What of the cradle-roof, that flies

Forward and backward through the air?

TIMES have changed since J. G. Holland wrote those lines. Cradles are frowned upon, wailing is no longer regarded as an inevitable minor accompaniment, and psychology has actually begun to trace the "gossamer links." Yet one implication of the verses remains true. The child is a discoverer in what is to him a strange new world. Its paths are as uncharted as was the western sea for Columbus. Each day is a voyage in exploration. Things matter-of-course to older folk tingle with newness to

ii him; facts that the world has long known he must learn for himself.

Nature has equipped him for it. Curiosity is one of the earliest, as it is one of the most permanent, of the human instincts. The normal child is a born adventurer. He is so built that he cannot remain politely inert in the presence of things that appeal to his senses. He is not only all eyes and ears, he is all hands and feet and restless activity as well. Just to have sensations is, as Professor Thorndike puts it, one of the natural satisfiers of human nature, and quite as natural is the instinct to be doing something with them. Mental emptiness, sheer inactivity, irk us all. The child is bound to react to his sensations with the demand for more. And he does not passively await their coming; he pushes out in whatever ways his little body will permit to seek new experiences.

Curiosity begins, perhaps, with the baby's stare, as early often as the second week. Miss Shinn tells, with approval, of her grandmother's rule, that you should never needlessly interrupt a baby's staring lest you hinder the development of the power of attention. Soon surprise and wonder appear, to be followed, as the little muscles permit, by active observation, experiment and play.

I remember watching a boy of eight months sit for what seemed a long time, just picking up a block from the floor and putting it down again, each time a little farther out, till he reached his limit and hitched along to begin again. It was the simplest sort of play, yet he was acquiring muscular control,

THE CHILD AS A DISCOVERER IS

not only of hand and arm, but of his whole body; he was developing space-perception and coordination of eye and hand, and he was learning some of the properties of blocks and floors.

What an impossible task his education would be, were he not so made as to respond with action, with interest and experiment, to a sense-stimulus, — were he simply to sit like a lump of putty, waiting to have parent or teacher fold his little fingers around that block, stretch out his arm for him and, seek to direct his lagging eye! What is true of so simple a bit of baby play is true throughout the whole of childhood. The child's physical activity, his constant play, his eager observation and experiment are the instruments of development and discovery.

The child's activity may, of course, become annoying. We may be impelled to command quiet for our nerves' sake, or for his sake may put a stop to play too prolonged or too venturesome. It is but to be expected that the little investigator's experiments may at times be unwise, destructive, cruel or even dangerous. Children will taste anything, and they have no way of telling poison from food, or colic-producers from wholesome fruits. They will take anything to pieces that they can get apart; and the more hidden the mechanism of a toy, the greater the challenge to their spirit of discovery. One toy that we have never been able to keep whole in our house, though we have bought several, is a "come back" cylinder that bears no hint whatever of mechanism on its surface, but mysteriously insists on rolling back to you when you start it rolling away.

Smith and Hall tell of a little girl who cried bitterly after she had spoiled her doll by poking in its eyes, not because it was ruined, but because, she tearfully explained, "Now I can't ever find out what makes dolly shut her eyes. Won't you buy me another one so I can find out?" Like curiosity leads to such apparently cruel acts as forcing open the eyes of little kittens, breaking chickens' legs to learn how to mend them, or dissecting frogs to see how they are put together. One boy is reported who, at the time when a scientific man's experiment in fasting was much talked of, shut up his pet squirrel to see how long it would live without food. Warnings of pain to himself, even, will not deter the little experimenter sometimes; he will try the forbidden thing and deliberately bring on the pain, to see how it feels.

The getting of experiences, however, is but the beginning of the young discoverer's adventure. He must explore their relations as well; he is not content till he understands his experiences- Man is, as Carlyle put it, a cause-hunting animal. Very early indeed, the child begins to compare things with one another, to observe likenesses, differences, connections, and sequences, to draw conclusions and to seek causes. To sensory curiosity is added rational curiosity. And to play, observation and experiment as methods of discovery, he adds questions put to his elders — infinitely many and of all sorts: What? Why? How? What for? Where from? What

THE CHILD AS A DISCOVERER 15

makes it? Who made it? What does so-and-so mean?

Examples need not be cited. We have all had to meet children's questions. They are at times aimless and random, the product not of real curiosity so much as of fatigue or peevishness, — the endless repetition of "Why?" questions is often of this type. But most often they reveal how puzzling to children are things that we take for granted, and how well the little investigators can reason with the data at their command. Professor Sully tells of a boy not yet four who asked, "Why don't we see two things with our two eyes?" and of another just past that age who inquired, "What is the good of bees?" When told that they make honey, he responded with the pertinent query, "Then do they bring it for us to eat?" R , aged five, came home from a kindergarten class where he had been told of the earth's shape and motion, eager to have it explained: "Why don't we fall off when the world is moving so fast?"

That children should ask hard questions about things metaphysical and theological is to be expected. They are deeply interested in origins, in birth and death, and in the God whom they cannot see and about whom we tell them so falteringly. Their reasoning here too is often surprisingly direct and sound. Sully tells about a boy of four who asked, "If I had gone upstairs, could God make it that I hadn't?" and about another of seven who asked, "Why doesn't God kill the devil, and then there would be no more wickedness in the world?" R , aged five, rummaging about at his grandmother's, found an old book about the Johnstown flood, and insisted on having the story. He astonished his Sunday-school teacher some months later by stoutly maintaining that God broke his promise to Noah, about which she was telling them — "How about the Johnstown flood?" "But, dear, God didn't send that; men made that dam such that it broke." "Yes," he replied, "but God sent the rain that made it break."

It is the privilege of us older folk to protect and guide the little discoverer, to foster rather than to repress his eager spirit of investigation, to provide materials for educative play, observation and experiment, and out of our larger experience so to answer his questions that he will be led to that knowledge of truth that makes men free.

1. Give examples which have come under your observation of children's play motived by curiosity or the desire to experiment. Of constructive play. Of destructiveness.

2. What sort of toys would you suggest for children to encourage inventiveness and foster the spirit of inquiry, yet not encourage destructiveness ?

3. Give some examples of children's questions which are hard to answer. How would you answer these questions ?

4. Name some possible harmful results of a policy of repression such as "Kfeep still," "Don't ask foolish questions," etc.

5. The opportunity which children's curiosity affords

THE CHILD AS A DISCOVERER 17

to the teacher, and ways in which the teacher may stimulate and use it.

The article by Smith and Hall is entitled "Curiosity and Interest," and is found in G. S. Hall: "Aspects of Child Life and Education." Other articles are H. W. Brown: "Some Records of the Thought and Reasonings of Children," Pedagogical Seminary, II, pp. 358-396, and H. L. Clapp: "The Educative Value of Children's Questions," Popular Science Monthly, XLIX, pp. 799-809. James Sully: "Studies of Childhood" has a body of concrete material, interpreted by a great psychologist. A thoroughly scientific statement of the facts is found in E. L. Thorndike: "The Original Nature of Man," which is followed by Norsworthy and Whitley: "The Psychology of Childhood."

Chapter II A Bundle Of Instincts

THE little human animal, like every other, is born going. He is already wound up. His lungs expand and contract; his heart is pumping away; his stomach is ready to handle food. These organic, vital activities he does not initiate. They begin themselves. The organism possesses them by nature. They are the very condition of life.

There are many other activities, not so obviously vital as these, for which nature winds him up quite as thoroughly — yes, and sets him to go off at the proper time for each. He will suck when brought to the breast as unfailingly as his lungs will begin to work upon contact with the air. He will cry from hunger or discomfort, clasp anything that touches his fingers or toes, carry to his mouth whatever he can grasp, in time smile when smiled at, later grow afraid when left alone or in the dark, manifest anger and affection, walk, run, play, question, imitate, collect things, pull things apart, put them together again, take pleasure in being with friends, act shy before strangers, find a chum, belong to a "gang" or "bunch," quarrel, fight, become reconciled, and some day fall in love with one of the opposite sex. These, and many more, are just his

A BUNDLE OF INSTINCTS 19

natural human ways. He does not of purpose initiate them any more than he initiates breathing or heartbeat. He does these things because he is so born and built. They are his instincts.

The child cannot do all these things at birth, of course. Each instinct manifests itself in its own time, as he grows and develops and meets the situations that call it forth. .The point is that he does not need to be introduced to any of these modes of behavior or have it started for him. He will just naturally find himself doing it some day, likely without knowing why. He inherits these tendencies as part of the native organization of his nervous system. It is so made that inevitably certain situations call forth these characteristic responses.

The instincts of many animals low in the scale of life are marvelously complete. They provide for a complex series of actions that fit, with mechanical precision, the details of certain situations in which the animal is placed. Lloyd Morgan tells of a beetle that lays its eggs near the entrance to the galleries of a mason bee. These are hatched out as active larvae, which in the spring fasten themselves to the bodies of the bee-drones as they pass from the galleries. There they cling till the nuptial flight of the bees, when as the insects mate they pass from the body of the drone to that of the female bee. Again they wait until the female lays her eggs; then they spring into the cells and consume eggs and honey while undergoing the metamorphoses which issue finally in their becoming perfect beetles. This series of actions, it is plain, could never be learned by imitation, or taught by one beetle to another. It is done only once in the lifetime of each beetle ; and it must at that time be done perfectly, else the beetle will not live. The instinct in this case is precise and complete; it is what Herbert Spencer called a "compound reflex." Every detail in the series is provided for, and takes place as mechanically and naturally as the action of heart or lungs in us.

Our human instincts are not so detailed or complete. The rule seems to be that animals are cared for by nature plus parents. When parents do nothing, nature does all; but when parents can or ought to be depended upon, nature leaves much to them. The little beetle never sees its mother or father, or even knows that it has any: its instincts therefore provide for its welfare in so wonderfully complete a way. The human baby, on the other hand, receives years of devoted parental care and its instincts are correspondingly vague and indefinite. It never could survive if left to itself.

The point is not that the human instincts retreat in the face of parental endeavor or that they abdicate to reason. It is simply that they are large and rough-hewn, with many details left blank; they lack the precision and completeness that the instincts of some lower animals possess. Instinct leads the bee to build a honeycomb, and provides for both material and pattern; it leads the bird to build a nest, and the beaver a dam, with less of specific direction; it impels the child to constructive play, but what and how the child shall build, it does not determine. Instinct leads the squirrel to collect nuts; it impels

A BUNDLE OF INSTINCTS 21

the child to collect — almost anything, Human instincts do not so much provide particular things to do, as impel to general types of action or feeling. The details are left to be filled in by parental training and by experience. Often they provide simply the innate capacity for some line of action or study, or the predisposition to some type of emotion.

This indefinite character of our innate tendencies makes possible their application to an infinitely wider variety of situations than could be met by instincts of a more mechanical sort. Unless the beetle chances to meet just the precise condition for which its instinct fits it, it will perish. But man, once given the protection infancy requires, is able to meet wholly new situations and conquer adverse circumstance. His instincts are capable of intelligent adaptation.

The fact is that intelligence and self-control, reason and will, grow and develop within our instincts, rather than outside of them. No instinct, once used, is after that as vague and indefinite as it was before. It has added two things to itself, a habit and an idea. Because it has this time acted in some definite way, it will tend thereafter to work that way again, in accord with the law of habit. And because its action has issued in some consciously experienced result, the idea of that result remains and will help to guide future action. The natural tendency need no longer be followed blindly. Every time that an instinct is used, therefore, it becomes more definite and more intelligent. The mature man, if he has lived rightly, has come to understand his instincts;

they have grown into habits, sentiments, principles and ideals, and each has fallen into its place in a rational unity of personal life.

The child stands at the beginning of this process of development. He is a little bundle of instincts which he does not yet understand, and of which he is not master. The one thing certain is that he will respond with action to the world about him rather than with mere contemplation, and that his actions will conform in a general way to the inherited human type. He will do the same sort of things that children have done for centuries before him, and will likely do for centuries to come. Here, then, is our opportunity and responsibility as parents and teachers. We do not need to wind children up to get them to do things ; they are already going. We do need to furnish the right material and stimulus, and to observe and guide their natural reactions. These instincts form the starting-point for all education and control. Some native tendencies we shall seek to preserve and perpetuate; some we shall do our best to get rid of; many we shall seek to modify or redirect. But, in any case, we shall succeed just in so" far as we begin by understanding what nature has put there in the first place.

I. What is meant by instinct as a characteristic of human beings? Make out the best list that you can of human instincts, and classify them if possible. Compare the lists

A BUNDLE OF INSTINCTS 23

and classifications of Kirkpatrick, McDougall and Thorndike.

2. In what respects are human instincts like, and in what respects unlike, the instincts of animals?

3. What is the relation of human instincts to. habits, ideas and ideals?

4. Methods of control and education of human instincts.

5. Why is it essential that parents and teachers should understand and enlist the instincts of children ?

William James: the chapter on "Instincts" in "Principles of Psychology"; E. A. Kirkpatrick: "Fundamentals of Child Study"; William McDougall: "An Introduction to Social Psychology"; E. L. Thorndike: "The Original Nature of Man" and "Education."

Chapter III Children's "lies"

ALL Cretans are liars" was an old-world proverb that found its way even into the Bible. There are those who would have us think that children are like Cretans in that respect. Perez thought that he could notice, even from the cradle, "signs of an innate disposition to concealment, to dissimulation, to ruse." Montaigne held that "falsehood grows as fast as children do."

Much depends, of course, on what we mean by a lie. Conscious falsehoods, told with intent to de-> ceive, are no more natural for children than they ought to be for grown-ups. But misstatements, exaggerations, fancies mixed with facts, are both common and natural. In general, these are not to be taken as evidence of moral delinquency or of hereditary taint. They may show simply that the child has not yet succeeded in straightening out his experiences, or that he does not fully understand his obligation to speak the truth.

Sincerity is natural, both for children and for grown-ups who have not been spoiled. But no human instinct prevents error, or prompts one without fail to tell the truth. The difference between fact and not-fact has to be learned; the ideal and the habit of truth-telling are acquired in the course of experience, through education and training.

I. Imaginative lies. Many, perhaps most, of the lies of younger children result from their confusion of imagination and reality. The boundary line between fact and fancy, to us older folk so clear, is very vague for them. Indeed, they begin with no line at all. There is no intrinsic difference between a bit of imagination and the sensation of which it is the reproduction. The image may be as vivid, clear and coercive as its archetype. Dreams may have every semblance of reality. The difference becomes manifest only in their contexts. The sensation is linked up with other experiences in a consistent and coherent order; the image is somewhere inconsistent with the experiences that go before and after it. Reality has no breaks; but dreams are bound somewhere to break with reality, if only when we wake to find ourselves in bed. Have a dream that links itself in memory with a previous dream or two, and you may find yourself at a loss to know whether you dreamed it or it actually happened.

Now a little child is often in somewhat this state of confusion. At first, he lacks entirely a basis upon which to mark off imagination from reality. He takes his mental images at face value; they are as real to him as sensations. He has not had experience enough to discriminate the probable from the improbable, the consistent and coherent from the wild and fanciful. The imagined bear behind the door stirs him to fear as readily and as really as the actual dog that jumps out to bark at him. Only gradually, as knowledge grows and widens, does he come to realize the difference between those experiences that "hang together" and "stay put" (and hence are real), and those other experiences whose contexts are so shifting and uncertain as to betray their imaginary character. The child's ability to discriminate fact from fancy develops slowly, and depends always upon the amount and kind of experience that he has had. Many a misstatement is honest enough a product of his own lack of clearness at this point.

There is sound psychology, therefore, in the familiar story of the little girl who, having insisted that there was a lion in the front yard, was ordered by her mother to go upstairs and to ask God to forgive her for lying. In a few minutes she returned happily with the news: "God said, 'Never you mind, Mary, that big dog pretty near fooled me too.' " Mrs. Fisher tells of a little girl who was thrown into a panic of fear at the sight of her father masquerading as a giant, in spite of the fact that he had explained everything to her beforehand and had shown her the costume he was to wear. "I knew it was just father," she explained when she recovered; "I knew that, but I thought it might be a giant."

2. Suggested lies. Imaginative lies are often suggested to children. Sully reports a child who, being asked by his mother who had told him something, answered "Dolly." Her question put into his mind the idea that some one had told him, and there was the doll which was his constant playmate — what more natural than that his imagination should seize upon the doll as the source of his information? A child of three, seeing a cough syrup that she liked being administered to another child, asked for some, claiming to be sick too and pretending to cough. No grown-up who feels like coughing when he hears some one else cough can deny the probability that this was not so much conscious deception as suggested illusion. L , aged three, when he hears

some one relate an especially interesting experience, is likely forthwith to repeat it as having happened to himself, without the least trace of shame and with complete disregard of the fact that everybody knows that it did not.

3. Lies of exaggeration. Children incline naturally to put things strongly, entirely aside from any ulterior motive to do so. Their narratives of real occurrences are likely to have more of color and contrast than was actually there. They generalize readily and somewhat recklessly. Their speech runs easily to plurals. In all of which, of course, they are not so very much unlike many adults.

4. Play lies. The lies of which we have thought thus far are believed, or at least more than half believed, by the children who tell them. What may be called play lies are not so believed, though they may be quite as innocent. They include the make-believe of dramatic play, where the child is conscious of playing a part; lies told to tease or shock or surprise some one else; and pretended secrets. R , aged five, from time to time meets his father with some story of his own brave deed or tragic mishap, only to end up after a little while with: "But I didn't really, daddy; I just wanted to see what you would say."

5. Lies of self-interest. More serious are the lies that children tell in self-interest, or for self-protection or self-defense. For them, as for older persons, the lie may be a means to the gratification of selfish ends, or a ready refuge in time of trouble. It is possible that our very measures of discipline, if too stern and unyielding, may drive them to lie. When

I asked R the other day what was the cause

of some trouble in the playroom, he wanted to know whether it would be safe for him to tell the truth : "But, daddy, will you spank me if I tell you what I did?"

6. Lies of rivalry and boasting. "To put up a front" seems natural to all ages. All who have read "Tom Sawyer" will remember Mark Twain's characteristic description of Tom and the new boy in town picking a fight, each threatening the other with the vengeance of a non-existent big brother. HalL and Smith, in their study of "showing off," give many examples of lies of this type. One child boasted that she had had a fever so high that it cracked the doctor's thermometer; another, that he was going to have a thousand dollars to spend on the day when the show came to town. A pathetic "front" is that of the little Fresh-air Fund child, who told her hosts that her father rode around in a carriage with a span of horses — the truth being that her father drove an ice-wagon. "Oh, that's nothing," retorted one in answer to another's tale of good fortune; "I went to Mexico last summer, and at the place where I was all I had to do was to pick up all the diamonds I could carry. Some of them were blue and some of them were red. I have a blue one home, as big as a hickorynut. M

7. Privileged lies. Many children conceive their obligation to speak the truth to depend upon personal relations. The truth is due, they feel, to father and mother, to friends and chums ; but not to those to whom they are bound by no such ties of mutual confidence and good-will. It is one's privilege to lie to enemies, strangers or mere acquaintances. When I reproved R one day for teasing a maid, putting it on the ground that he might make her feel badly, he replied, "Well, she doesn't belong to our family." This tendency is fostered by well-meaning parents and teachers who put all emphasis upon the children's personal relation to themselves, to the neglect of the development of right ideals of impartial honesty, justice and truth.

8. Lies to do good. Older children, who have come to understand what truth is, are yet often ready to justify a lie provided it be told to do good to some one else. In their own practical experience, this generally means a lie told to help some other child escape blame or punishment: theoretically, they will bring to mind, like many older reasoners than they, such cases as lies to save reputation, or property, or life, the physician's lie to help his patient, and the like. Older folk foster this tendency by the opprobrium that many so undiscriminatingly put upon tale-bearing. There are many grown-up people whose ideas concerning their own behavior, as well as concerning the training of children, are unclear and confused at this point.

9. Lies of mental reservation. Older children will at times appease their consciences when lying by making inaudible reservations, such as "maybe," "in my mind," "over the left," "nit," "don't you think it," "I don't mean it." They ignore the fact that these are not open to the person to whom the lie is told, and regard their duty to the truth as fulfilled by what takes place within their own minds. Sometimes such palliating mental reservations are annexed to promises which the child really intends to fulfill," as a sort of prudent provision for a possible future desire to break them.

Children have odd little oaths of their own, formulas of affirmation which they offer and accept as guaranties of the truth of a statement. Small, in his study on "The Instinct for Certainty," has collected many of these, such as: "Honest"; "Really and truly"; "Honor bright"; "Cross my heart"; "Hope to die"; "Sure as you live"; "Honest and true, black and blue, lay me down and cut me in two."