A STUDY OF A CHILD.* HOWEVER unreservedly we may regard
the classic dictum, "Know thyself," as the master-key of most departments of human knowledge, there is one at least in which the utility of its application is distinctly doubtful. And that is the train- ing of the young of the human species. In the old, unhappy education, both parents and teachers were only too ready to take themselves as the standard of attainment,—and of the universe. The child was regarded as simply a smaller edition of the man, and was expected to attain a certain fixed proportion of adult capacity at the close of every year. This was ensured by administering an appropriate fractional dose per annum of the sum total of knowledge required at maturity, chopped fine, and sometimes seasoned. The subject • d Study of a Chad. By LOWE° Hogan. With Illustrations. London Harper and Brothers. Raj
of all this discipline, the child himself, was considered chiefly as clay in the hands of the potter, a mere plastic mass. His individuality, his natural growth-tendencies were sadly too much treated as influences to be circumvented, or even thwarted and repressed. The child was made for education, rather than education for the child. Gradually, however, the burning messages of the prophets of the gospel of trust in Nature, Rousseau, Froebel, Pestalozzi, Herbart, caused a stirring among the dry bones. This was even more forcibly seconded by the convincing object-lessons of the success of the true educators, the "born teachers," who, heaven be praised have lived and laboured in every age, under, and in spite of, every system. It began to dawn upon the schoolmaster mind that the child's mind bad as natural and inherent a tendency to grow and develop of itself, as his body.
Whether the course of this natural development would ultimately lead to the goal of the system was a question, but its general trend was in that direction. At all events, it was worth while to try to utilise its forces as far as possible, to work with rather than across them, and even, perhaps, to modify some features of the sacred standard to that end. In short, an attempt was made to fit the system to the child instead of the child to the system. From this beginning sprang that curious movement for "child-study," as it is termed, which has swept like a wave over the American educational world, and is making marked progress on this side of the Atlantic. Chairs have been established for it in all the training Colleges and in many Universities, associa- tions formed for its promotion in all countries; it has journals devoted entirely to it and a literature of its own already. One of the first things discovered by the leaders in the movement, somewhat to their surprise, was the scarcity of accurate and detailed records of the actual course of development of any given specimen of the young "human animal." Careful and trustworthy bio- graphies of children are rare. "Bright sayings " and stories about them are abundant ; but these, even if trustworthy, are naturally concerned chiefly with the exceptional or even abnormal. From Darwin's pioneer work upon the order of development in the reflexes and senses of his own child to the beautiful studies of Preyer upon his, the really valuable and continuous records could be numbered upon the fingers of one hand. Now, however, a host of enthusiastic observers and recorders are at work in the home, and a number of most interesting and valuable child-biographies have appeared, of which this curious little volume is the latest. It is a careful and detailed record, in the form of a diary, of the sayings and doings of an only child of evidently educated and well- to•do parents, kept apparently by the mother and edited by the teacher, whose name it bears. Its most striking features are the illustrations, consisting of sketches, plain and coloured, of most original design by the " subject " himself. This, taken with the fact that much of the text naturally consists of a transcript of his childish prattle, makes the work almost an autobiography, or what physiologists would call a " self-registered tracing." It is a charmingly fresh and natural picture of that subject which never fails to draw and kindle all eyes, a little child. The drawing is not only faithful but remarkably impartial, although naturally there is at times a distinct " atmosphere " of chastened exultation, both in the virtues and talents of the child himself and in the excellent results of the system upon which he was brought up. As, however, this system was a careful and admirably carried out policy of resolute non-interference with Nature, it gives the book its chief value. You feel that you have before you a series of photographs of the way in which a healthy child, born under favourable circumstances, naturally tends to grow and develop. Not that this involves inactivity or indifference on the part of the parents by any means. On the con- trary, it requires more intelligent supervision, and a much larger personal share in the actual care of the child. The training is based entirely upon the utilisa- tion of what is known in pedagogic circles as the " self- activity " of the child. The child's mind is as full of
perpetual " go " as his little body is, and the aim is not to repress any of this, but to turn it all in the right direction.
Keep him so busy doing right that he has no time to do wrong. In order to do this no course of action must be pre- scribed, but only suggested along lines for which the child
has already shown a tendency. Of course to the believer in "total depravity," to the rigid disciplinarian, this is little better than heresy, or even rank nonsense, but it is surprising bow many good tendencies a child will present for utilisation if he is carefully watched with this end in view. And the results obtained in the case before us certainly justify the method. No attempt is made to depict Harold as a paragon of virtue or an angel of the " die-young-and-go-to-heaven " type, but no one can read his tiny history without feeling that he is a manly, courteous, sweet-tempered little fellow, independent, but singularly self-controlled,—an unconscious witness to the truth underlying James Whitcomb Riley's quaint refrain from the lips of his infant-philosopher :—
" The bestes' men, they n'aint so good As naughties' litl' chile?'
Our little friend's mental initiative was equally scrupulously respected. He was given no formal teaching whatever ; no information even was imparted to him except in answer to his questions. When the record closes, at the beginning of his eighth year, he bad only been a few weeks in school at intervals. And here the results can be definitely tabulated. He was never taught to read or even his letters, yet before he was two years old he had taught himself nine of the letters from his alphabet-blocks ; at three he had sufficient idea of the looks of words to repeat " Froggie would a-wooing go " with the book open before him, and turn the pages at exactly the right lines. At six be devoured Andrew Lang's well-known Yellow Fairy-Book, surmounting even words of three syllables.
Worse yet, he was never taught the sacred multiplication table or even his numbers, but allowed to count, as the awkward decimal system of notation proves that our primi- tive ancestors did, upon his fingers and thumbs. This faculty was as late in developing in him as in the race, but before he was five he began adding thumbs together, then asked bow to count beyond his bands, and after being shown how to count to twenty and told to " begin over again " and go on, he counted straight through to ninety-nine by himself, saying, of course, " threety " and " fivety " for thirty and fifty, From this time a positive enthusiasm for numbers set in, and his progress was rapid ; he counted the pages of his books, read the numbers on the houses, and finding that he had 74 cents, and wishing to know how much he lacked of a dollar, he took a piece of paper and began counting at seventy-five, putting down a stroke for each number up to a hundred. Then he counted the strokes, and announced to his mother that if he had 26 cents more he would have a dollar.
His instruction in writing consisted simply in hanging a writing-chart above his little table and supplying him with plenty of paper and pencils. Photographs of his MSS. show that at four years old he could print legibly, and that at six he wrote quite a respectable little letter to Santa Claus. If a child will work out for himself such results as these, even in the revered "Three R.'s," it goes far to justify the shrewd suspicion which has been growing steadily in the minds of thoughtful teachers, that many of the boasted results of our systems of education have been attained under, rather than through, them,—perhaps even in spite of them.
The record confirms in several most interesting points the now generally accepted theory that the child's development is an epitome of that of the race. Harold's sense for colours, other than red and yellow, was quite late in developing. His earliest words were chiefly of two or more syllables, instead of one, as popularly believed, thus agreeing with the accepted linguistic theory that the "agglutinative" or "reduplicating" languages are the most primitive, instead of the "mono- syllabic," as formerly supposed. His taste for bird and animal stories appeared earlier than that for fairy-tales, thus preserving a forgotten " hunting-and-snaring " stage of race- development which preceded that of legend and myth, when there was as yet no written language or perhaps even settled speech.
In fine, Miss Hogan's charming little book can be cordially recommended, not only to the teacher and the parent, but to all lovers of children and students of human nature.
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