RELIGION AND THE CHILD

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VII. RELIGION AND THE CHILD

Religious Education in Relation to Social Hygiene and to Psychology—The Psychology of the Child—The Contents of Children's Minds—The Imagination of Children—How far may Religion be assimilated by Children?—Unfortunate Results of Early Religious Instruction—Puberty the Age for Religious Education—Religion as an Initiation into a Mystery—Initiation among Savages—The Christian Sacraments—The Modern Tendency as regards Religious Instruction—Its Advantages—Children and Fairy Tales—The Bible of Childhood—Moral Training.

It is a fact as strange as it is unfortunate that the much-debated question of the religious education of children is almost exclusively considered from the points of view of the sectarian and the secularist. In a discussion of this question we are almost certain to be invited to take part in an unedifying wrangle between Church and Chapel, between religion and secularism. That is the strange part of it, that it should seem impossible to get away from this sectarian dispute as to the abstract claims of varying religious bodies. The unfortunate part of it is that in this quarrel the interests of the community, the interests of the child, even the interests of religion are alike disregarded.

If we really desire to reach a sound conclusion on a matter which is unquestionably of great moment, both for the child and for the community of which he will one [218]day become a citizen, we must resolutely put into the background, as of secondary importance, the cries of contending sects, religious or irreligious. The first place here belongs to the psychologist, who is building up the already extensive edifice of knowledge concerning the real nature of the child and the contents and growth of the youthful mind, and to the practical teacher who is in touch with that knowledge and can bring it to the test of actual experience. Before considering what drugs are to be administered we must consider the nature of the organism they are to be thrust into.

The mind of the child is at once logical and extravagant, matter-of-fact and poetic or rather mytho-p[oe]ic. This combination of apparent opposites, though it often seems almost incomprehensible to the adult, is the inevitable outcome of the fact that the child's dawning intelligence is working, as it were, in a vacuum. In other words, the child has not acquired the two endowments which chiefly give character to the whole body of the adult's beliefs and feelings. He is without the pubertal expansion which fills out the mind with new personal and altruistic impulses and transforms it with emotion that is often dazzling and sometimes distorting; and he has not yet absorbed, or even gained the power of absorbing, all those beliefs, opinions, and mental attitudes which the race has slowly acquired and transmitted as the traditional outcome of its experiences.

The intellectual processes of children, the attitude and contents of the child's mind, have been explored during recent years with a care and detail that have never been [219]brought to that study before. This is not a matter of which the adult can be said to possess any instinctive or matter-of-course knowledge. Adults usually have a strange aptitude to forget entirely the facts of their lives as children, and children are usually, like peoples of primitive race, very cautious in the deliberate communication of their mental operations, their emotions, and their ideas. That is to say that the child is equally without the internally acquired complex emotional nature which has its kernel in the sexual impulse, and without the externally acquired mental equipment which may be summed up in the word tradition. But he possesses the vivid activities founded on the exercise of his senses and appetites, and he is able to reason with a relentless severity from which the traditionalized and complexly emotional adult shrinks back with horror. The child creates the world for himself, and he creates it in his own image and the images of the persons he is familiar with. Nothing is sacred to him, and he pushes to the most daring extremities—as it seems to the adult—the arguments derived from his own personal experiences. He is unable to see any distinction between the natural and the supernatural, and he is justified in this conviction because, as a matter of fact, he himself lives in what for most adults would be a supernatural atmosphere; most children see visions with closed and sometimes with open eyes; [163] they are not infrequently subject [220]to colour-hearing and other synæsthetic sensations; and they occasionally hear hallucinatory voices. It is possible, indeed, that this is the case with all children in some slight degree, although the faculty dies out early and is easily forgotten because its extraordinary character was never recognized.

Of 48 Boston children, says Stanley Hall, [164] 20 believed the sun, moon, and stars to live, 16 thought flowers could feel, and 15 that dolls would feel pain if burnt. The sky was found the chief field in which the children exercise their philosophic minds. About three-quarters of them thought the world a plain with the sky like a bowl turned over it, sometimes believing that it was of such thin texture that one could easily break through, though so large that much floor-sweeping was necessary in Heaven. The sun may enter the ground when it sets, but half the children thought that at night it rolls or flies away, or is blown or walks, or God pulls it higher up out of sight, taking it up into Heaven, according to some putting it to bed, and even taking off its clothes and putting them on again in the morning, or again, it is believed to lie under the trees at night and the angels mind it. God, of whom the children always hear so [221]much, plays a very large part in these conceptions, and is made directly responsible for all cosmic phenomena. Thus thunder to these American children was God groaning or kicking or rolling barrels about, or turning a big handle, or grinding snow, or breaking something, or rattling a big hammer; while the lightning is due to God putting his finger out, or turning the gas on quick, or striking matches, or setting paper on fire. According to Boston children, God is a big, perhaps a blue, man, to be seen in the sky, on the clouds, in church, or even in the streets. They declare that God comes to see them sometimes, and they have seen him enter the gate. He makes lamps, babies, dogs, trees, money, etc., and the angels work for him. He looks like a priest, or a teacher, or papa, and the children like to look at him; a few would themselves like to be God. His house in the sky may be made of stone or brick; birds, children, and Santa Claus live with God.

Birds and beasts, their food and their furniture, as Burnham points out, all talk to children; when the dew is on the grass "the grass is crying," the stars are candles or lamps, perhaps cinders from God's stove, butterflies are flying pansies, icicles are Christmas candy. Children have imaginary play-brothers and sisters and friends, with whom they talk. Sometimes God talks with them. Even the prosiest things are vivified; the tracks of dirty feet on the floor are flowers; a creaking chair talks; the shoemaker's nails are children whom he is driving to school; a pedlar is Santa Claus.

Miss Miriam Levy once investigated the opinions of 560 [222]children, boys and girls, between the ages of 4 and 14, as to how the man in the moon got there. Only 5 were unable to offer a serious explanation; 48 thought there was no man there at all; 50 offered a scientific explanation of the phenomena; but all the rest, the great majority, presented imaginative solutions which could be grouped into seventeen different classes.

Such facts as these—which can easily be multiplied and are indeed familiar to all, though their significance is not usually realized—indicate the special tendencies of the child in the religious sphere. He is unable to follow the distinctions which the adult is pleased to make between "real," "spiritual" and "imaginary" beings. To him such distinctions do not exist. He may, if he so pleases, adopt the names or such characteristics as he chooses, of the beings he is told about, but he puts them into his own world, on a footing of more or less equality, and he decides himself what their fate is to be. The adult's supreme beings by no means always survive in the struggle for existence which takes place in the child's imaginative world. It was found among many thousand children entering the city schools of Berlin that Red Riding Hood was better known than God, and Cinderella than Christ. That is the result of the child's freedom from the burden of tradition.

Yet at the same time the opposite though allied peculiarity of childhood—the absence of the emotional developments of puberty which deepen and often cloud the mind a few years later—is also making itself felt. Extravagant as his beliefs may appear, the child is an [223]uncompromising rationalist and realist. His supposed imaginativeness is indeed merely the result of his logical insistence that all the new phenomena presented to him shall be thought of in terms of himself and his own environment. His wildest notions are based on precise, concrete, and personal facts of his own experience. That is why he is so keen a questioner of grown-up people's ideas, and a critic who may sometimes be as dangerous and destructive as Bishop Colenso's Zulus. Most children before the age of thirteen, as Earl Barnes states, are inquirers, if not sceptics.

If we clearly realize these characteristics of the childish mind, we cannot fail to understand the impression made on it by religious instruction. The statements and stories that are repeated to him are easily accepted by the child in so far, and in so far only, as they answer to his needs; and when accepted they are assimilated, which means that they are compelled to obey the laws of his own mental world. In so far as the statements and stories presented to him are not acceptable or cannot be assimilated, it happens either that they pass by him unnoticed, or else that he subjects them to a cold and matter-of-fact logic which exerts a dissolving influence upon them.

Now a few of the ideas of religion are assimilable by the child, and notably the idea of a God as the direct agent in cosmic phenomena; some of the childish notions I have quoted illustrate the facility with which the child adopts this idea. He adopts, that is, what may be called the hard precise skeleton of the idea, and imagines a [224]colossal magician, of anthropomorphic (if not paidomorphic) nature, whose operations are curious, though they altogether fail to arouse any mysterious reverence or awe for the agent. Even this is not very satisfactory, and Stanley Hall, in the spirit of Froebel, considers that the best result is attained when the child knows no God but his own mother. [165] But for the most part the ideas of religion cannot be accepted or assimilated by children at all; they were not made by children or for children, but represent the feelings, thoughts, and experiences of men, and sometimes even of very exceptional and abnormal men. "The child," it has been said, "no doubt has the psychical elements out of which the religious experience is evolved, just as the seed has the promise of the fruit which will come in the fullness of time. But to say, therefore, that the average child is religious, or capable of receiving the usual advanced religious instruction, is equivalent to saying that the seed is the fruit or capable of being converted into fruit before the fullness of time." [166] The child who grows devout and becomes anxious about the state of his soul is a morbid [225]and unwholesome child; if he prefers praying for the conversion of his play-fellows to joining them in their games he is not so much an example of piety as a pathological case whose future must be viewed with anxiety; and to preach religious duties to children is exactly the same, it has been well said, as to exhort them to imagine themselves married people and to inculcate on them the duties of that relation. Fortunately the normal child is usually able to resist these influences. It is the healthy child's impulse either to let them fall with indifference or to apply to them the instrument of his unmerciful logic.

Naturally, the adult, in self-defence, is compelled to react against this indifferent or aggressive attitude of the child. He may be no match for the child in logic, and even unspeakably shocked by his daring inquiries, like an amiable old clergyman I knew when a Public School teacher in Australia; he went to a school to give Bible lessons, and was one day explaining how King David was a man after God's own heart, when a small voice was heard making inquiries about Uriah's wife; the small boy was hushed down by the shocked clergyman, and the cause of religion was not furthered in that school. But the adult knows that he has on his side tradition which has not yet been acquired by the child, and the inner emotional expansion which still remains unliberated in the child. The adult, therefore, fortified by this superiority, feels justified in falling back on the weapon of authority: "You may not want to believe this and to learn it, but you've got to."

[226]It is in this way that the adult wins the battle of religious education. In the deeper and more far-seeing sense he has lost it. Religion has become, not a charming privilege, but a lesson, a lesson about unbelievable things, a meaningless task to be learnt by heart, a drudgery. It may be said that even if that is so, religious lessons merely share the inevitable fate of all subjects which become school tasks. But that is not the case. Every other subject which is likely to become a school task is apt to become intelligible and attractive to some considerable section of the scholars because it is within the range of childish intelligence. But, for the two very definite reasons I have pointed out, this is only to an extremely limited degree true as regards the subject of religion, because the young organism is an instrument not as yet fitted with the notes which religion is most apt to strike.

Of all the school subjects religion thus tends to be the least attractive. Lobsien, at Kiel, found a few years since, in the course of a psychological investigation, that when five hundred children (boys and girls in equal numbers), between the ages of nine and fourteen, were asked which was their favourite lesson hour, only twelve (ten girls and two boys) named the religious lesson. [167] In other words, nearly 98 per cent children (and nearly all the boys) find that religion is either an indifferent or a repugnant subject. I have no reports at hand as regards English children, but there is little reason to suppose that the result would be widely different. [168] [227]Here and there a specially skilful teacher might bring about a result more favourable to religious teaching, but that could only be done by depriving the subject of its most characteristic elements.

This is, however, not by any means the whole of the mischief which, from the religious point of view, is thus perpetrated. It might, on a priori grounds, be plausibly argued that even if there is among healthy young children a certain amount of indifference or even repugnance to religious instruction, that is of very little consequence: they cannot be too early grounded in the principles of the faith they will later be called on to profess; and however incapable they may now be of understanding the teaching that is being inculcated in the school, they will realize its importance when their knowledge and experience increase. But however plausible this may seem, practically it is not what usually happens. The usual effect of constantly imparting to children an [228]instruction they are not yet ready to receive is to deaden their sensibilities to the whole subject of religion. [169] The premature familiarity with religious influences—putting aside the rare cases where it leads to a morbid pre-occupation with religion—induces a reaction of routine which becomes so habitual that it successfully withstands the later influences which on more virgin soil would have evoked vigorous and living response. So far from preparing the way for a more genuine development of religious impulse later on, this precocious scriptural instruction is just adequate to act as an inoculation against deeper and more serious religious interests. The commonplace child in later life accepts the religion it has been inured to so early as part of the conventional routine of life. The more vigorous and original child for the same reason shakes it off, perhaps for ever.

Luther, feeling the need to gain converts to Protestantism as early as possible, was a strong advocate for the religious training of children, and has doubtless had much influence in this matter on the Protestant churches. "The study of religion, of the Bible and the Catechism," [229]says Fiedler, "of course comes first and foremost in his scheme of instruction." He was also quite prepared to adapt it to the childish mind. "Let children be taught," he writes, "that our dear Lord sits in Heaven on a golden throne, that He has a long grey beard and a crown of gold." But Luther quite failed to realize the inevitable psychological reaction in later life against such fairy-tales.

At a later date, Rousseau, who, like Luther, was on the side of religion, realized, as Luther failed to realize, the disastrous results of attempting to teach it to children. In La Nouvelle Héloïse, Saint-Preux writes that Julie had explained to him how she sought to surround her children with good influences without forcing any religious instruction on them: "As to the Catechism, they don't so much as know what it is." "What! Julie, your children don't learn their Catechism?" "No, my friend, my children don't learn their Catechism." "So pious a mother!" I exclaimed; "I can't understand. And why don't your children learn their Catechism?" "In order that they may one day believe it. I wish to make Christians of them." [170]

Since Rousseau's day this may be said to be the general attitude of nearly all thinkers who have given attention to the question, even though they may not have viewed it psychologically. It is an attitude by no means confined [230]to those who are anxious that children should grow up to be genuine Christians, but is common to all who consider that the main point is that children should grow up to be, at all events, genuine men and women. "I do not think," writes John Stuart Mill, in 1868, "there should be any authoritative teaching at all on such subjects. I think parents ought to point out to their children, when the children begin to question them or to make observations of their own, the various opinions on such subjects, and what the parents themselves think the most powerful reasons for and against. Then, if the parents show a strong feeling of the importance of truth, and also of the difficulty of attaining it, it seems to me that young people's minds will be sufficiently prepared to regard popular opinion or the opinion of those about them with respectful tolerance, and may be safely left to form definite conclusions in the course of mature life." [171]

There are few among us who have not suffered from too early familiarity with the Bible and the conceptions of religion. Even for a man of really strong and independent intellect it may be many years before the precociously dulled feelings become fresh again, before the fetters of routine fall off, and he is enabled at last to approach the Bible with fresh receptivity and to realize, for the first time in his life, the treasures of art and beauty and divine wisdom it contains. But for most that moment never comes round. For the majority the religious education of the school as effectually seals the [231]Bible for life as the classical education of the college seals the great authors of Greece and Rome for life; no man opens his school books again when he has once left school. Those who read Greek and Latin for love have not usually come out of universities, and there is surely a certain significance in the fact that the children of one's secularist friends are so often found to become devout church-goers, while, according to the frequent observation, devout parents often have most irreligious offspring, just as the bad boys at school and college are frequently sons of the clergy.

At puberty and during adolescence everything begins to be changed. The change, it is important to remember, is a natural change, and tends to come about spontaneously; "where no set forms have been urged, the religious emotion," as Lancaster puts it, "comes forth as naturally as the sun rises." [172] That period, really and psychologically, marks a "new birth." Emotions which are of fundamental importance, not only for the individual's personal life but for his social and even cosmic relationships, are for the first time born. Not only is the child's body remoulded in the form of a man or a woman, but the child-soul becomes a man-soul or a woman-soul, and nothing can possibly be as it has been before. The daringly sceptical logician has gone, and so [232]has the imaginative dreamer for whom the world was the automatic magnifying mirror of his own childish form and environment. It has been revealed to him that there are independent personal and impersonal forces outside himself, forces with which he may come into a conscious and fascinatingly exciting relationship. It is a revelation of supreme importance, and with it comes not only the complexly emotional and intellectual realization of personality, but the aptitude to enter into and assimilate the traditions of the race.

It cannot be too strongly emphasized that this is the moment, and the earliest moment, when it becomes desirable to initiate the boy or girl into the mysteries of religion. That it is the best moment is indicated by the well-recognized fact that the immediately post-pubertal period of adolescence is the period during which, even spontaneously, the most marked religious phenomena tend to occur. [173] Stanley Hall seems to think that twelve is the age at which the cultivation of the religious consciousness may begin; "the age, signalized by the ancient Greeks as that at which the study of what was comprehensively called music should begin, the age at which Roman guardianship ended, at which boys are [233]confirmed in the modern Greek, Catholic, Lutheran and Episcopal Churches, and at which the Child Jesus entered the Temple, is as early as any child ought consciously to go about his Heavenly Father's business." 174] But I doubt whether we can fix the age definitely by years, nor is it indeed quite accurate to assert that so early an age as twelve is generally accepted as the age of initiation; the Anglican Church, for example, usually confirms at the age of fifteen. It is not age with which we ought to be concerned, but a biological epoch of psychic evolution. It is unwise to insist on any particular age, because development takes place within a considerably wide limit of years.

I have spoken of the introduction to religion at puberty as the initiation into a mystery. The phrase was deliberately chosen, for it seems to me to be not a metaphor, but the expression of a truth which has always been understood whenever religion has been a reality and not a mere convention. Among savages in nearly all parts [234]of the world the boy or girl at puberty is initiated into the mystery of manhood or of womanhood, into the duties and the privileges of the adult members of the tribe. The youth is taken into a solitary place, for a month or more, he is made to suffer pain and hardship, to learn self-restraint, he is taught the lore of the tribe as well as the elementary rules of morality and justice; he is shown the secret things of the tribe and their meaning and significance, which no stranger may know. He is, in short, enabled to find his soul, and he emerges from this discipline a trained and responsible member of his tribe. The girl receives a corresponding training, suited to her sex, also in solitude, at the hands of the older women. A clear and full description of a typical savage initiation into manhood at puberty is presented by Dr. Haddon in the fifth volume of the Reports of the Cambridge Anthropological Expedition to Torres Straits, and Dr. Haddon makes the comment: "It is not easy to conceive of more effectual means for a rapid training."

The ideas of remote savages concerning the proper manner of initiating youth in the religious and other mysteries of life may seem of little personal assistance to superiorly civilized people like ourselves. But let us turn, therefore, to the Greeks. They also had preserved the idea and the practice of initiation into sacred mysteries, though in a somewhat modified form because religion had ceased to be so intimately blended with all the activities of life. The Eleusinian and other mysteries were initiations into sacred knowledge and insight which, as is now recognized, involved no revelation of [235]obscure secrets, but were mysteries in the sense that all intimate experiences of the soul, the experiences of love quite as much as those of religion, are mysteries, not to be lightly or publicly spoken of. In that feeling the Greek was at one with the Papuan, and it is interesting to observe that the procedure of initiation into the Greek mysteries, as described by Theon of Smyrna and other writers, followed the same course as the pubertal initiations of savages; there was the same preliminary purification by water, the same element of doctrinal teaching, the same ceremonial and symbolic rubbing with sand or charcoal or clay, the same conclusion in a joyous feast, even the same custom of wearing wreaths.

In how far the Christian sacraments were consciously moulded after the model of the Greek mysteries is still a disputed point; [175] but the first Christians were seeking the same spiritual initiation, and they necessarily adopted, consciously or unconsciously, methods of procedure which, in essentials, were fundamentally the same as those they were already familiar with. The early Christian Church adopted the rite of Baptism not merely as a symbol of initiation, but as an actual component part of a process of initiation; the purifying ceremony was preceded by long preparation, and when at last completed the baptized were sometimes crowned with garlands. When at a later period in the history of the Church the physical part of the initiation was divorced [236]from the spiritual part, and baptism was performed in infancy and confirmation at puberty, a fatal mistake was made, and each part of the rite largely lost its real significance.

But it still remains true that Christianity embodied in its practical system the ancient custom of initiating the young at puberty, and that the custom exists in an attenuated form in all the more ancient Christian Churches. The rite of Confirmation has, however, been devitalized, and its immense significance has been almost wholly lost. Instead of being regarded as a real initiation into the privileges and the responsibilities of a religious communion, of an active fellowship for the realization of a divine life on earth, it has become a mere mechanical corollary of the precedent rite of baptism, a formal condition of participation in the Sacrament of Holy Communion. The splendid and many-sided discipline by which the child of the savage was initiated into the secrets of his own emotional nature and the sacred tradition of his people has been degraded into the learning of a catechism and a few hours' perfunctory instruction in the schoolroom or in the parlour of the curate's lodgings. The vital kernel of the rite is decayed and only the dead shell is left, while some of the Christian Churches have lost even the shell.

It is extremely probable that in no remote future the State in England will reject as insoluble the problem of imparting religious instruction to the young in its schools, in accordance with a movement of opinion which is [237]taking place in all civilized countries. [176] The support which the Secular Education League has found in the most various quarters is without doubt a fact of impressive significance. [177] It is well known also that the working classes—the people chiefly concerned in the matter—are distinctly opposed to religious teaching in State schools. There can be little doubt that before many years have passed, in England as elsewhere, the Churches will have to face the question of the best methods of themselves undertaking that task of religious training which they have sought to foist upon the State. If they are to fulfil this duty in a wise and effectual manner they must follow the guidance of biological psychology at the point where it is at one with the teaching of their own most ancient traditions, and develop the merely formal rite of confirmation into a true initiation of the new-born soul at puberty into the deepest secrets of life and the highest mysteries of religion.

It must, of course, be remembered that, so far as England is concerned, we live in an empire in which [238]there are 337 millions of people who are not even nominally Christians, [178] and that even among the comparatively small proportion (about 14 per cent) who call themselves "Christians," a very large proportion are practically Secularists, and a considerable number avowedly so. If, however, we assume the Secularist's position, the considerations here brought forward still retain their validity. In the first place, the undoubtedly frequent hostility of the Freethinker to Christianity is not so much directed against vital religion as against a dead Church. The Freethinker is prepared to respect the Christian who by free choice and the exercise of thought has attained the position of a Christian, but he resents the so-called Christian who is merely in the Church because he finds himself there, without any effort of his will or his intelligence. The convinced secularist feels respect for the sincere Christian, even though it may only be in the sense that the real saint feels tenderness for the hopeless sinner. And in the second place, as I have sought to point out, the facts we are here concerned with are far too fundamental to concern the Christian alone. They equally concern the secularist, who also is called upon to satisfy the spiritual hunger of the adolescent youth, to furnish him with a discipline for his entry into life, and a satisfying vision of the universe. And if secularists have not always grasped this necessity, we may perhaps find therein one main reason why secularism [239]has not met with so enormous and enthusiastic a reception as the languor and formalism of the churches seemed to render possible.

If the view here set forth is sound,—a view more and more widely held by educationists and by psychologists trained in biology,—the first twelve years must be left untouched by all conceptions of life and the world which transcend immediate experience, for the child whose spiritual virginity has been prematurely tainted will never be able to awake afresh to the full significance of those conceptions when the age of religion at last arrives. But are we, it may be asked, to leave the child's restless, inquisitive, imaginative brain without any food during all those early years? By no means. Even admitting that, as it has been said, at the early stage religious training is the supreme art of standing out of Nature's way, it is still not hard to find what, in this matter, the way of Nature is. The life of the individual recapitulates the life of the race, and there can be no better imaginative food for the child than that which was found good in the childhood of the race. The child who is deprived of fairy tales invents them for himself,—for he must have them for the needs of his psychic growth just as there is reason to believe he must have sugar for his metabolic growth,—but he usually invents them badly. [179] The savage sees the [240]world almost exactly as the civilized child sees it, as the magnified image of himself and his own environment; but he sees it with an added poetic charm, a delightful and accomplished inventiveness which the child is incapable of. The myths and legends of primitive peoples—for instance, those of the British Columbian Indians, so carefully reproduced by Boas in German and Hill Tout in English—are one in their precision and their extravagance with the stories of children, but with a finer inventiveness. It was, I believe, many years ago pointed out by Ziller that fairy-tales ought to play a very important part in the education of young children, and since then B. Hartmann, Stanley Hall and many others of the most conspicuous educational authorities have emphasized the same point. Fairy tales are but the final and transformed versions of primitive myths, creative legends, stories of old gods. In purer and less transformed versions the myths and legends of primitive peoples are often scarcely less adapted to the child's mind. Julia Gayley argues that the legends of early Greek civilization, the most perfect of all dreams, should above all be revealed to children; the early traditions of the East and of America yield material that is scarcely less fitted for the child's imaginative uses. Portions of the Bible, especially of Genesis, are in the strict sense fairy tales, that is legends of early gods and their deeds which have become stories. In the opinion of many these portions of the Bible may suitably be given to children (though it is curious to observe that a Welsh Education Committee a few years ago prohibited the reading in [241]schools of precisely the most legendary part of Genesis); but it must always be remembered, from the Christian point of view, that nothing should be given at this early age which is to be regarded as essential at a later age, for the youth turns against the tales of his childhood as he turns against its milk-foods. Some day, perhaps, it may be thought worth while to compile a Bible for childhood, not a mere miscellaneous assortment of stories, but a collection of books as various in origin and nature as are the books of the Hebraic-Christian Bible, so that every kind of child in all his moods and stages of growth might here find fit pasture. Children would not then be left wholly to the mercy of the thin and frothy literature which the contemporary press pours upon them so copiously; they would possess at least one great and essential book which, however fantastic and extravagant it might often be, would yet have sprung from the deepest instincts of the primitive soul, and furnish answers to the most insistent demands of primitive hearts. Such a book, even when finally dropped from the youth's or girl's hands, would still leave its vague perfume behind.

It may be pointed out, finally, that the fact that it is impossible to teach children even the elements of adult religion and philosophy, as well as unwise to attempt it, by no means proves that all serious teaching is impossible in childhood. On the imaginative and spiritual side, it is true, the child is re-born and transformed during adolescence, but on the practical and concrete side his life and thought are for the most part but the regular and orderly development of the habits he has already acquired. [242]The elements of ethics on the one hand, as well as of natural science on the other, may alike be taught to children, and indeed they become a necessary part of early education, if the imaginative side of training is to be duly balanced and complemented. The child as much as the adult can be taught, and is indeed apt to learn, the meaning and value of truth and honesty, of justice and pity, of kindness and courtesy; we have wrangled and worried for so long concerning the teaching of religion in schools that we have failed altogether to realize that these fundamental notions of morality are a far more essential part of school training. It must, however, always be remembered that they cannot be adequately treated merely as an isolated subject of instruction, and possibly ought not to be so treated at all. As Harriet Finlay-Johnson wisely says in her Dramatic Method of Instruction: "It is impossible to shut away moral teaching into a compartment of the mind. It should be firmly and openly diffused throughout the thoughts, to 'leaven the whole of the lump.'" She adds the fruitful suggestion: "There is real need for some lessons in which the emotions shall not be ignored. Nature study, properly treated, can touch both senses and emotions." [180]

[243]The child is indeed quite apt to acquire a precise knowledge of the natural objects around him, of flowers and plants and to some extent of animals, objects which to the savage also are of absorbing interest. In this way, under wise guidance, the caprices of his imagination may be indirectly restrained and the lessons of life taught, while at the same time he is thus being directly prepared for the serious studies which must occupy so much of his later youth.

The child, we thus have to realize, is, from the educational point of view of social hygiene, a being of dual nature, who needs ministering to on both sides. On the one hand he demands the key to an imaginative paradise which one day he must leave, bearing away with him, at the best, only a dim and haunting memory of its beauty. On the other hand he possesses eager aptitudes on which may be built up concrete knowledge and the sense of human relationships, to serve as a firm foundation when the period of adolescent development and discipline at length arrives.

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This book is part of the public domain. Havelock Ellis (2007). The Task of Social Hygiene. Urbana, Illinois: Project Gutenberg. Retrieved October 2022 https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/22090/pg22090-images.html

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