Chapter 22
THE UNITY OF EXPERIENCE
"We find in the child's spontaneous choice the nature of the surroundings and of the activities he craves for; in other words, he makes his own curriculum, and selects his own subject matter."
The next problem we have to solve is how to unify the bewildering variety of ideas and activities that a child seeks contact with during a day. We found that the curriculum of the Infant School of to-day presented a rather confusing variety of ideas, not necessarily arranged as the children would have chosen; they would certainly not have chosen to break off some intense interest, because an arbitrary timetable hurried them to something else, and they would have been right. If we asked the children their reasons for choosing, we would find no clue except that they chose what they wanted to, neither could they tell us why they spent so much more time over one thing than another. If a similar study were to be made of a child from a slum also free to arrange his day, we should find that while certain general features were the same others would be different: he would ask for different stories, probably play different games, or the same games in a different way, his back-yard would present different aspects, the things he made would be different.
It is evident that the old correlation method has little or nothing to do with the matter; a child may or may not draw the rabbit he feeds, he certainly does not play a rabbit game because of the rabbit he has fed, nor does he build a rabbit-hutch with his bricks. He might try to make a real one if the rabbit really needed it, but that arises out of an obvious necessity. If he could put his unconscious promptings into words, he would say he did the things because he wanted to, because somebody else did them, or because of something he saw yesterday, and so on; but he would always refer back to _himself_. The central link in each case is in the child, with his special store of experiences derived from his own particular surroundings; he brings to new experiences his store of present experiences, his interests not always satisfied, his powers variously used, he interprets the new by these, and seeks for more in the line of the old. It is life he has experienced, and he seeks for more life.
How then can we secure for him that the new experiences presented to him in school will be in line with the old? We will take three typical cases of children to illustrate the real nature of this problem.
The first is the case of a child living in a very poor district of London or of any large town. The school is presumably situated in a narrow street running off the High Street of the district, the street where all the shopping is done; at the corner is a hide factory with an evil smell. Most of the dwelling-houses abut on the pavement, some with a very small yard behind, some without any. Several families live in one house, and often one room is all a family can afford; as that has to be paid for in advance the family address may change frequently. The father may be a dock labourer with uncertain pay, a coster, a rag and bone merchant, or he may follow some unskilled occupation of a similarly precarious nature; in consequence the mother has frequently to do daily work, the home is locked up till evening, and she often leaves before the children start for morning school. It is a curious but very common fact that, free though these children are, they know only a very small radius around their own homes. They are accustomed to be sent shopping into High Street, where household stores are bought in pennyworths or twopennyworths, owing to uncertain finance and no storage accommodation. Generally there is one tap and one sink in the basement for the needs of all the families in the house. There is usually a park somewhere within reach, but it may be a mile away; in it would, at least, be trees, a pond, grass, flowers. But an excursion there, unless it is undertaken by the school, can only be hoped for on a fine Bank Holiday; there is neither time nor money to go on a Saturday, and Sunday cannot be said to begin till dinner-time, about 3 P.M., when the public-houses close, and the father comes home to dinner.
It is difficult to imagine the conversation of such a household; family life exists only on Sunday at dinner-time; the child's background of family life is a room which is at once a bedroom, living room and laundry. There is nearly always some part of a meal on the table, and some washing hanging up. Outside there are the dingy street, the crowded shops, the pavement to play on, and both outside and in, the bleaker and more sordid aspects of life, sometimes miserable, sometimes exciting. On Saturday night the lights are brilliant and life is at least intense. Bed is a very crowded affair, in which many half-undressed children sleep covered with the remainder of the day's wardrobe.
What store of experiences does a child from such a neighbourhood bring to school, to be assimilated with the new experiences provided there? What do such terms as home, dinner, bed, bath, birth, death, country, mean to him? They mean _something_.[34]
[Footnote 34: See _Child Life_, October 1916.]
Not a mile away we may come to a very respectable suburb of the average type; and what is said of it may apply in some degree to a provincial or country town or, at least, the application can easily be made. The school probably stands at the top corner of a road of houses rented, at £25 to £35 per annum, with gardens in front and behind. The road generally runs into a main road with shops and traffic. Here and there in the residential road are little oases of shops, patronised by the neighbourhood, and some of the children may live over these. The home life is more ordinary and needs less descriptive detail, but there are some features that must be considered. The decencies, not to say refinements of eating, sleeping and washing are taken for granted: there is often a bath-room and always a kitchen. The father's occupation may be local, but a good many fathers will go to town; there is generally a family holiday to the sea, or less often to the country. In the house the degree of refinement varies; there are nearly always pictures of a sort, books of a sort, and the children are supplied with toys of a sort. They visit each other's houses, and the observances of social life are kept variously. Often the horizon is very narrow; the mother's interest is very local and timid; the father's business life may be absolutely apart from his home life and never mentioned there. The family conversation while quite amiable and agreeable may be round very few topics, and the vocabulary, while quite respectable, may be most limited. Children's questions may be put aside as either trivial or unsuitable. In one sense the slum child may be said to have a broader background, the realities of life are bare to him on their most sordid side, there is neither mystery nor beauty around life, or death, or the natural affections. The suburban child may on the contrary be balked and restricted so that unnecessary mystery gives an unwholesome interest to these things and conventionality a dishonest reserve.
A suburb of this type is described by Beresford in _Housemates_:--"In such districts (as Gospel Oak) I am depressed by the flatness of an awful monotony. The slums vex me far less. There I find adventure and jest whatever the squalor; the marks of the primitive struggle through dirt and darkness towards release. Those horrible lines of moody, complacent streets represent not struggle, but the achievement of a worthless aspiration. The houses, with their deadly similarity, their smug, false exteriors, their conformity to an ideal which is typified by their poor imitative decoration, could only be inhabited by people who have no thought or desire for expression.... The dwellers in such districts are cramped into the vice of their environment. Their homes represent the dull concession to a state rule; and their lives take tone from the grey, smoke-grimed repetition of one endlessly repeated design. The same foolish ornamentation on every house reiterates the same suggestion. Their places of worship, the blank chapels and pseudo-Gothic churches rear themselves head and shoulders above the dull level, only to repeat the same threat of obedience to a gloomy law.... The thought of Gospel Oak and its like is the thought of imitation, of imitation falling back and becoming stereotyped, until the meaning of the thing so persistently copied has been lost and forgotten."
A third case is that of the country child, the child who attends the village school. Many villages lie several miles from a railway station, so that the younger children may not see a railway train more than once or twice a year. The fathers may be engaged in village trades, such as a shoemaker, carpenter, gardener, general shop merchant, farm labourer, or farmer. The village houses are often cramped and small, but there is wholesome space outside, and generally a good garden which supplies some of the family food; milk and eggs are easily obtainable, and conditions of living are seldom as crowded as in a town. The country children see more of life in complete miniature than the slum or the suburban child can do, for the whole life of the village lies before him. The school is generally in the centre, with a good playground, and of late years a good school garden is frequent. The village church, generally old, is another centre of life, and there is at least the vicarage to give a type of life under different social conditions.
The home intellectual background may vary, but on the whole cannot be reckoned on very much; though in some ways it is more narrow than the suburban one, it is often less superficial. In a different way from the slum child, but none the less definitely, the country child comes face to face with the realities of life, in a more natural and desirable way than either of the others. It is difficult to estimate some of the effects of living in the midst of real nature on children; unconsciously, they acquire much deep knowledge impossible to learn through nature study, however good, a kind of knowledge that is part of their being; but how far it affects them emotionally or enters into their scheme of life, is hard to say. As they grow up much of it is merely economic acquirement: if they are to work on the land, or rear cattle, or drive a van through the country, it is all to the good; but one thing is noticeable, that they take very quickly to such allurements of town life as a cinema, or a picture paper or gramophone, and this points to unsatisfied cravings of some sort, not necessarily so unworthy or superficial as the means sought to satisfy them.
From these rather extreme cases we get near the solution of the problem; it is quite evident that each of these children brings to school very different contributions of experience on which to build, though their general needs and interests are similar. Therefore the curriculum of the school will depend on the general surroundings and circumstances of the children, and all programmes of work and many questions of organisation will be built on this. The model programme so dear to some teachers must be banished, as a doctor would banish a general prescription; no honest teacher can allow this part of her work to be done for her by any one else.
Therefore the central point is the child's previous experience, and on this the experience provided by school, _i.e._ curriculum and subject matter, depends. One or two examples of the working out of this might make the application clearer. Probably the realities of life in relation to money differ greatly. The kind of problem presented to the poor town child will deal with shopping in pennyworths or ounces, with getting coals in pound bagfuls. Clothes are generally second-hand, and so ordinary standard prices are out of the question. Bread is bought stale and therefore cheaper, early in the morning. Preserved milk only is bought, and that in halfpenny quantities. Only problems based on these will be real to this child at first.
The suburban child's economic experience may be based on his pocket-money, money in the bank, and the normal shopping of ordinary life.
The country child is frequently very ignorant of money values; probably it will be necessary to take the country general shop as the basis. He could also begin to estimate the produce of the school garden.
THE NURSERY SCHOOL PROGRAMME
It is quite obvious from the nature of play at this stage that a time-table is out of the question and in fact an outrage against nature. Only for social convenience and for the establishment of certain physical habits can there be fixed hours. There must be approximate limits as to the times of arrival and departure, but nothing of the nature of marking registers to record exact minutes. Little children sometimes sleep late, or, on the other hand, the mothers may have to leave home very early; all this must be allowed for. There should be fixed times for meals and for sleep, and these should be rigidly observed, and there should be regular times for the children to go to the lavatories; all these establish regularity and self-control, as well as improving general health. But anything in the nature of story periods, games periods, handwork periods, only impedes the variously developing children in their hunger for experiences.
Their curriculum is life as the teacher has spread it out before them; there are no subjects at this stage; the various aspects ought to be of the nature of a glorious feast to these young children. Traherne says in the seventeenth century:--
"Will you see the infancy of this sublime and celestial greatness? Those pure and virgin apprehensions I had in my infancy, and that divine light wherewith I was born, are the best unto this day wherein I can see the Universe.... Verily they form the greatest gift His wisdom can bestow, for without them all other gifts had been dead and vain. They are unattainable by books and therefore will I teach them by experience.... Certainly Adam in Paradise had not more sweet and curious apprehensions of the world than I when I was a child.
"All appeared new and strange at first, inexpressibly rare and delightful and beautiful. I was a little stranger which at my entrance into the world was saluted and surrounded with innumerable joys.... I knew by intuition those things which since my apostasy I collected again by the highest reason.... All things were spotless and pure and glorious; yea, and infinitely mine, and joyful and precious.... I saw in all the peace of Eden.... Is it not that an infant should be heir of the whole world, and see those mysteries which the books of the learned never unfold?
"The corn was orient and immortal wheat which never should be reaped, nor was ever sown. I thought it stood from everlasting to everlasting. The dust and stones of the street were as precious as gold: the gates were at first the end of the world. The green trees when I saw them first through one of the gates transported and ravished me: ... the skies were mine, and so were the sun and moon and stars, and all the world was mine: and I the only spectator and enjoyer of it.... So that with much ado I was corrupted and made to learn the dirty devices of this world, which I now unlearn, and become, as it were, a little child again that I may enter into the Kingdom of Heaven."
If this is what life means to the young child, and Traherne only records what many of us have forgotten there is little need for interference: we can only spread the feast and stand aside to watch for opportunities.
The following extract is given from a teacher's note-book: it shows how many possibilities open out to a teacher, and how impossible it is to keep to a time-table, or even to try to name the activities. The children concerned were about five years old, newly admitted to a poor school in S.E. London. The records are selected from a continuous period, and do not apply to one day:--
PLANS FOR THE DAY WHAT ACTUALLY HAPPENED
_Number Occupations._--This will The children played, freely be entirely free and the children chalking most of the time; those will choose their own toys and threading beads were most put them away. interested. Again I noticed the lack of idea of colour; I found one new boy placing his sticks according to colour, without knowing the names of the colours. The boys thought the soldiers belonged to them, and laughed at a little girl for choosing them.
_Language Training._--I have I realised this was a failure, discovered that they love to for I asked the children to use imitate sounds, so we will play their boards and chalks for a at this. They could draw a cat definite drawing, and they should and say "miauw," and a duck and have had the time to use them say "quack." They could also freely and discover their use. I imitate the wind. got very little information about their vocabulary.
_Language Training_ (_another I found that many children day_).--I shall try to induce the pronounced words so strangely children to speak to me about their that I could only with difficulty homes, in order to discover any recognise them. One said she difficulties of pronunciation and had a "bresser" with "clates" to make them more fluent. on it and "knies" Others spoke of "manckle," "firebrace," "forts." One child speaking of curly hair called it "killeyer." We had no time for the story.
_Playing with Toys._--The Noah's arks, dolls, and bricks children will choose their own toys, were used, and I found that the and as far as possible I will put girls who had no dolls at home a child who knows how to use them were delighted to be able to dress next to one who desires to sit and undress them and put them still. to bed. One little girl walked backwards and forwards before the class getting her doll to sleep; the boys were making a noise with their arks and she remarked on this, so we induced them to be silent while the dolls were put to sleep. The boys arranged their animals in long lines. The bricks were much more carefully put away to-day.
THE TRANSITION AND THE JUNIOR SCHOOL PROGRAMME
Even after the Nursery School period much of the curriculum and subject matter is in the hands of the children themselves, though the relative proportions will vary according to the children's experiences. It is pretty evident to the honest-minded teacher that the subjects are, in school terms, nature work and elementary science, mathematics, constructive and expressive work, literature, music, language, physical exercise and religion. The business of the younger child is with real things and activity, not with symbols and passivity, therefore he is not really in need of reading, writing, or arithmetic. We hear arguments from ambitious teachers that children are fond of reading lessons because they enjoy the fantasies in which these lessons are wrapped, or the efforts made by the teacher to create interest; we hear that children ask to be taught to read; they also ask to be taught to drive a tram or to cook a dinner; but it is all part of the pretence game of playing at being grown up. They do not need to read while stories and poetry can be told or read to them; they are not ready to make the effort of working for a remote economic end, where there is no real pleasure in the activity, and no opportunity of putting their powers to use. No child under six wants to sit down and read, and it would be very harmful if he did; his business is with real things and with his vocabulary, which is not nearly ready to put into symbols yet. If reading is delayed, hours of weary drudgery will be saved and energy stored for more precious attainments.
Therefore in the transition class (_i.e._ children over six at lowest) the only addition to the curriculum already set out for the nursery class, would be arithmetic and reading, including writing. The other differences would be in degree only. In the junior class (with children over seven at lowest) a desire to know something of the doings of people in other countries, to hear about other parts of our own land, will lead to the beginnings of geography; while with this less imaginative and more literal period comes the request for stories that are more verbally true, and questions about origins, leading to the beginnings of history.
It is very much easier to give the general curriculum than to deal with the choice of actual material, because that is involved largely with the principle of the unity of experience, and, as we know, experiences vary. The normal town and country child, and the abnormal child of poverty have all certain human cravings in common, and these are provided for in the aspects of life or subjects that have been named--but this is far too general an application to be the end of the matter; each subject has many sides to offer. There may be for example the pottery town, the weaving town, the country town, the fishing town, the colliery town: in the country there is the district of the dairy farmer, of the sheep farmer, of the grain grower and miller, of the fruit farmer, of the hop grower, and many districts may partake of more than one characteristic. Perhaps the most curious anomaly of experience is that of the child of the London slums who goes "hopping" into some of the loveliest parts of Kent, in early autumn. And so in a general way at least the concentrated experience of school must fill gaps and supply experiences that life has not provided for.
One of the pottery towns in Staffordshire is built on very unfertile clay; there are several potteries in the town belching out smoke, and, in addition, rows of monotonous smoke-blackened houses; almost always a yellow pall of smoke hangs over the whole district, and even where the edge of the country might begin, the grass and trees are poor and blackened, and distant views are seen through a haze. There are almost no gardens in the town, and very little attempt has been made to beautify it, because the results are so disappointing. Beauty, therefore, in various forms must be a large part of the curriculum: already design is a common interest in the pottery museums of the district, and this could be made a motive for the older children; but in the Junior and Nursery School pictures of natural beauty, wild flowers if it is possible to get them, music, painting and drawing, and literature should bulk largely enough to make a permanent impression on the children. In a very remote country village where life seems to go slowly, and days are long, children should be encouraged, by means of the school influence, to make things that absorb thought and interest, to tell and hear stories. Storytelling in the evening round the fire is a habit of the past, and might well supply some of the cravings that have to be satisfied by the "pictures." Most of us have to keep ourselves well in hand when we listen to a recitation in much the same way as when a slate pencil used to creak; it would be very much better if the art of storytelling were cultivated at school, encouraged at home, and applied to entertainments. Indeed the entertainments of a village school, instead of being the unnatural and feverish production of hours of overtime, might well be the ordinary outcome of work both at school and at home--and thus a motive for leisure is naturally supplied and probably a hobby initiated.
It is profitable sometimes to group the subjects of experience in order to preserve balance. All getting of experience is active, but some kinds more obviously than others. Undoubtedly in hearing stories and poetry, in watching a snail or a bee, in listening to music, the activity is mental rather than physical and assimilation of ideas is more direct; in discovering experiences by means of construction, expression, experiment or imitation, assimilation is less direct but often more permanent and secure. Froebel discriminates between impression and expression, or taking in and giving out, and although he constantly emphasised that the child takes in by giving, it is convenient to recognise this distinction. Another helpful grouping is the more objective one. Some subjects refer more particularly to human conduct, the enlargement of experiences of human beings, and the building up of the ideal: these are literature, music, history and geography; others refer to life other than that of human beings, commonly known as nature study and science; others to the properties of inanimate things, and to questions throughout all life of measurement, size and force--this is known as mathematics; others of the life behind the material and the spiritual world--this is known as religion.