Io. In what sense are our actions always reactions?

II. How do we differ from the little child in voluntary control?

12. What attitude should parents and teachers take toward the

child's physical activity?

LESSON III

EARLY CHILDHOOD

We begin the study of the separate periods in the development of personality with early childhood-the first six years of life.

I. The little child lives in a world of play. Most of us grown people live in a world of work. The difference, we imagine, is that the things we have to do are of real value, while what the child does is not.

But the child's play is of real value. It is more than a means of occupying him, or of working off his surplus energy. It is more even than a means of exercise to promote physical growth and development. It is a preparation for life. Groos has shown that young animals instinctively anticipate in their play the activities which will be of use in their maturity. So, too, the play of children develops instincts and powers which will later be needed. Girls play with dolls and teasets; boys like to make things, build houses and dams, keep store or play at soldier. Colonel Parker used to say that "play is God's method of teaching children how to work."

More than this, play is essential to the best general development of body, mind and character. Coe sums it up well :

"Quickness and accuracy of perception; co-ordination of the muscles, which puts the body at the prompt service of the mind; rapidity of thought; accuracy of judgment; promptness of decision; self-control; respect for others; the habit of cooperation; self-sacrifice for the good of a group-all these products of true education are called out in plays and games.' ?? * And they can be gotten nowhere else so easily and surely, or se early in life. A child without play matures quickly, but his life will always remain stunted. "The boy without a play-ground is father to

the man without a job."

The difference between work and play is really one of inward attitude. Any activity is play in so far as it is thoroughly enjoyed; it is work if we do it only because we must to gain some end. The negro stevedores on the Mississippi play while loading a steamboat, with *Coe: "Education in Religion and Morals," p. 4

their songs and rivalry; yet baseball is work for the professional player who must keep at it day after day. The advance from childhood to maturity ought not to mean so much a stepping out of the world of play into the world of work, as a carrying over the play spirit into the responsible activities of manhood and womanhood.

2. The play of early childhood has its own distinctive characteristics:

(1) It is play, not amusement. The child is never content simply to watch the activities of others, and to be amused by things done for him. He wants to enter into the action himself.

(2) The little child cares nothing for games-that is, for play subject to rules. His plays are almost wholly free and unregulated, and any attempt to dictate when or where or how he shall play is apt to meet with failure. Through imitation, however, simple games may be taught. If you play in a certain manner with evident enjoyment he will want to do the same thing.

(3) Children of this age play alone. If they do play with one another, their enjoyment is self-centered. There is neither rivalry nor team play.

(4) The child's play is at first wholly a matter of the senses and muscles. He uses neither in any accurate or definite way, but finds keen enjoyment in the free repetition of some activity or sensation. A natural rhythmical tendency is soon manifest. Jingles and songs and rhythmic movements are a source of keen delight, while many a story or bit of poetry that is not at all understood will yet be enjoyed for the cadence of the voice that reads or tells it.

(5) Plays exercising the memory and imagination begin about the third year. From that time on to the end of the period the child's play becomes largely imaginative and dramatic.

(6) Throughout the period the child's play is imitative.

3. Eager and impressionable senses are characteristic of early childhood. In this strange world where the child one day finds himself, there are so many new things to see and hear and feel that he has little time, even if he should have the powers to think over his experiences and to inquire into those abstract qualities and relations with which we older people interest ourselves. The mind of a child is intensely concrete. He lives in a world of perception, rather than of thought. Round-eyed, quick to hear and eager to touch, he is busy absorbing the world about him.

And he is not content simply to await sensations and to absorb what

comes to him; he actively seeks new experiences. Curiosity is one of the earliest, as it is one of the most permanent, of the human instincts. It manifests itself first as sensory curiosity-the tendency to prolong sensations, to experience them again, and to seek new ones. Later, rational curiosity appears-the desire to learn the relations which things have to one another, and the tendency to draw and test conclusions respecting matters not directly experienced. The curiosity of early childhood is predominantly sensory, though rational curiosity begins to reveal itself in the latter half of the period, as anyone well knows who has had to answer a child's "How?" "Why?" "What for?" and "Where from?"

Curiosity often manifests itself in undesirable ways—in too persistent questioning, in pulling things to pieces, and in general mischief. These should be checked; but care must be taken not to injure the instinct itself, or to destroy the child's natural thirst for knowledge. His open senses and eager mind are your heaven-sent opportunity. And the world needs men who can bring to its problems a free spirit of question and discovery. It owes to such men its science and philosophy and the achievements of civilization. Your problem is, not to repress the child's curiosity, but to turn it toward worthy objects, and to develop it in right directions.

The child's senses will drink in anything that is presented to them. He is unable to discriminate between good and bad, true and false, wise and foolish. There is only one safe rule: Do absolutely nothing before a child that you would not have him copy. Let nothing touch his senses that you would not have enter permanently into his life. There may be exceptions; undoubtedly some things which a child sees and hears make no permanent impressions upon him—but you cannot tell when the exceptions come.

You cannot tell by questioning a little child what things have made a lasting impression upon him—for many reasons besides the likelihood that he will not catch the drift of your questions. We all know that many things which we see and hear modify our thoughts and actions in ways of which we remain unconscious; and this is far more true of the child. Moreover, the memory of a child is different from our own. It is exceedingly impressionable and retentive, yet with little power to recall. A child's impressions are lasting. Old people sometimes remember the events of their childhood more clearly and vividly than those of later life. Yet the child's power to recall any impression when he wants it is comparatively weak. He has made but few associations, and those without concentration of attention.

What he can recall is no test, therefore, of what his memory has gotten and is retaining.

4. A little child is intensely imaginative. Imagination is the power mentally to reproduce sensations. It has two great uses. First, it is the picture-making faculty of the mind. It enables us vividly to see and hear and touch absent things as though they were present, and to picture abstract and spiritual truths in concrete ways. Second, it is inventive and productive. While it is limited to a reproduction of past experiences-it can create no images for which there have been no previous sensations—it brings bits of them together into totally new combinations. It gives birth alike to fairy stories and to great novels, to Handel's oratorios and to the hypotheses of a Newton; it inspired Columbus' discovery of a hemisphere and the Wrights' conquest of the air.

The imagination of a little child manifests both these characteristics. He thinks in concrete pictures, because he has little power of abstraction, and has not yet learned the distinction between the material and the spiritual. His inventive fancy runs riot, for he does not yet feel the stern logic of facts.

(1) He tends to personify everything. He draws no sharp line between the animate and the inanimate, between persons, animals and things. And as the first and most definite objects of his knowledge are persons, and the terms he understands best are those which stand for actions, he interprets everything in personal terms.

"Jean Ingelow tells us that when she was a little girl she was sure that stones were alive, and she felt very sorry for them because they always had to stay in one place. When she went walking she would take a little basket, fill it with stones and leave them at the farthest point of the walk, sure that they were grateful to her for the new view."*

The child's conception of the world about him is in fact akin to that of the primitive savage, to whom every natural object seemed alive. This accounts for what is sometimes called the "superstition" of children. The term is wrongly applied-children can no more have superstitions than they can have scientific ideas. The fact is simply that the child's conception of the world makes tales of miracles and impossible wonders, of fairies, elves and angels, as probable as matte of sober fact; and he delights in them because they appeal to his love of action and to his sense of wonder.

*Tanner: "The Child," p. 124.