goody-goody, nor should they contain any effort to reveal spiritual ideas and motives that are beyond the child's spontaneous interest. What is needed is the truth of life embodied in simple, sensuous forms, especially forms of outward action.' (2) The child now makes a distinction between fact and fancy. His imagination is becoming critical. All stories were alike to the credulity of early childhood. But now he is getting perspective. He recognizes a difference between stories that are "just stories" and those that are "really true" or "could happen." Some that he once implicitly believed are now called into question. He wants to know whether fairy tales are true, or whether Santa Claus is real. 5. The fact is that reason is awakening. The child is beginning to grasp the relations of things and to fit them together into a connected whole. Only the tiny baby accepts the moments as they come, without question of whence or whither, how or why. As soon as the mind awakens, the little child seeks causes for the happenings that fill his days. He finds them, we have seen, in personal agencies. He interprets all nature after the pattern of himself, and peoples his world with fairies and elves. Almost insensibly, however, he grows away from this conception. As day after day brings more experience, the regularity and continuity of natural events stand out ever more plainly. Time and again, the same two things are joined together. When the one happens, the other follows. He comes soon to look upon the one as the cause of the other-and then there is no more need of fairies or giants. He has come to see that things cause one another. Henceforth he seeks thing-causes. The transition is not made all at once. It is pretty sure to center, however, in middle childhood. With the influx of new ideas at school and the freedom of a wider companionship, the child soon outgrows the myths of his earlier years and reaches out toward a more rational comprehension of the world about him. It is a time of eager mental activity and of endless questions. The child is putting his world together. It is a work of thought, not merely of the senses. He is learning the relations of things to one another, and is as eager as he had been to see and touch in the first place. We are apt to make either of two mistakes in dealing with the child at this time, One is to demand too much of him, assuming a reason *Coe: "Education in Religion and Morals," p. 232. ing power which he has not yet attained. He reasons only in terms of sequence. He associates cause and effect, not because he sees the real ground of their relationship, but simply because they happen together in time and space. He cannot analyze such a relationship into its elements and discriminate the essential from the non-essential. He cannot reason abstractly, and is not at all certain to draw a logical conclusion from given premises. All this must wait until adolescence, for reason is the last to mature of the intellectual powers. The other mistake is to fail to meet the demands which the child's reason makes upon us. The most important of these demands are (1) consistency; (2) openness and sincerity. (1) Consistency is demanded because the child is forming his own ideas of right and wrong. He forms them in the same way that he does his ideas of physical things-by reasoning from the sequence of events. Actions are bad, to his mind, which are followed by disagreeable results; those are good which bring pleasure. Moral laws are to him simple statements of cause and effect. He judges actions solely by their consequences. It is plain what is required of us. We must be firm and consistent in our dealings with him. We must abide by the simple laws we wish him to learn. There must be no exceptions, justified by some higher bit of reasoning that he cannot comprehend. We must see to it that always bad results follow bad actions, and good goes with good. In short, we must confront him with a moral order as inflexible as is the physical order, that he may be able to formulate definite moral laws, and that obedience to law and respect for the right may grow naturally within him. (2) Openness and sincerity are demanded in our answers to his questions. The mother who will not answer truthfully a child's doubt concerning Santa Claus, because "it is so nice for the little ones to believe in him," sells her boy's birthright for a paltry bit of play. He believes her until the truth is forced upon him by the ridicule of schoolmates. She has deceived him, and left him to find out elsewhere and to suffer in the finding. Yet he ought to have the right to come to mother before anyone else in the world, for the truth and with the truth. There is a barrier now; his confidence is shaken-and then she grieves in later years that he does not come to her with his problems! The teacher is faithless to his trust who teaches a child to accept as literal truth any Bible story or figure that he does not himself accept in that way, because "children are not old enough to be bothered with such things." Some day the youth so taught will pass through an agony of doubt; and it may mean the shipwreck of a soul. We need to remember that the child now has both imagination and reason, and that he will continue throughout life to need both. We must recognize the distinction that he draws between "just stories" and "things that really happened." We must minister both to the story-appetite and to the hunger for facts. And-most important of all—we must show him that there is a vast middle ground between mere fancy on the one hand and the plain recital of fact on the other; the middle ground of truth presented under the forms of the imagination. "Faust," "Macbeth," "Enoch Arden," "The Idylls of the King"--who cares whether the events they tell ever happened in just that way? These tell more than facts; they feed the soul upon truth. Literature is more than history; it is a seer's vision of truth set down in pictures that we too may see. The Bible is more than a chronicle of events; it is a divinely inspired interpretation of history, a book of life and truth. No distinction that life will bring is more important than this threefold one: literal fact, imaginative truth and mere fancy. And now, when the distinction begins to be made, is the time to shape it if we would have the boy become what he ought to be-a man of perfect fidelity to fact on the one hand, and of whole-souled appreciation of literature and art on the other, discriminating in both the true from the idle and the false. Give both the truth and the story of Santa, therefore, the myths of the Greeks and Norsemen as well as primary lessons in science, the fact with the figure in the Bible story. Do not be afraid to answer when a child asks whether a story ever happened, "No, it never happened; but don't you think it tells us something true?"--and show him just what you mean. The child is not ready, of course, to receive the whole truth on every subject-in fact, not on any. But that is not necessary. To hold something back is not to evade or deceive. We need give only so much as his spontaneous interests demand; and that must be in a form that he can understand. Children's questions about birth and sex constitute a special problem, and one peculiarly grave. The parent who evades them condemns his boy to find out from companions in ways that are full of impure suggestion. Frankly and plainly, without preaching and without mystery, these questions should be answered with the simple and literal truth-never going beyond the child's spontaneous interest, but satisfying it completely. They are not for the teacher to answer, however. It is the sacred duty of the father and mother. 6. The child of this age is still self-centered and must be dealt with individually. He likes to be with other children, but the competitive motive is strong and he has no idea of subordinating self to the good of the group. The real awakening of the social instincts comes afterward, in later childhood. The instinct of imitation, however, leads the child out in a measure beyond himself. He now imitates the doer rather than the deed. Instead of copying single actions, he wants to be like the person behind the action. He begins to think of what he would like to be when grown up, and his choice is always the reflection of what those nearest to him are-father, mother, friend or teacher. Your influence is never greater than right now. QUESTIONS 1. Where shall we place the transition from early to middle childhood? Why? 2. Describe the physical growth and health of this period. 3. How does the play of middle childhood differ from that of early childhood? 4. What is the process of apperception? State the law of apperception. What problem does the process of apperception set the teacher? 5. Why are the apperceptions of middle childhood especially hard to understand? 6. How may the Sunday school teacher best make sure that he understands the ideas of Primary children? 7. How does the imagination of middle childhood differ from that of early childhood? 8. What proofs are there that the child's reason is now awakening? 9. What is meant by the statement that the child reasons only in terms of sequence? 10. Why ought we be consistent in our dealings with children? 11. How ought we meet a child's questions in search of the truth? Give all the reasons you can for your answer. 12. How does the individualism of middle childhood differ from that of early childhood? Its imitation? LESSON V LATER CHILDHOOD Life is unique in the years from nine to thirteen. The boy and girl are unlike the children that were, or the youth and maid that will be. Later childhood has as distinctive characteristics as adolescence. "Health is almost at its best, activity is greater and more varied than it ever was before or ever will be again, and there is peculiar endurance, vitality and resistance to fatigue. . . . Perception is very acute, and there is great immunity to exposure, danger, accident, as well as to temptation." * Yet it is hard to say exactly where the period begins. The average child enters it when he begins to read easily and naturally; and it will be best for our purpose to let this mark the transition. When a child can understand and enjoy books for himself, life acquires a new range. The whole wide world of literature lies open before him, and he plunges into it with a mind as eager as ever his senses had been to make acquaintance with the material world. 1. This is a period of slow growth, of health and hardihood. The first marked difference between the sexes appears, girls being quicker to develop than boys. The tenth year in girls and the eleventh in boys are years of very slow growth. In both sexes, this retardation is followed by an acceleration which heralds the coming of adolescence. Since this acceleration begins a year or more earlier in girls, they are apt to be taller and heavier than boys at the close of this period and the beginning of the next. During the three years from nine to twelve, a boy increases in weight 29 per cent and in height less than 11 per cent-a less rapid growth than that of middle childhood. Girls increase in weight 37 per cent and in height 13 per cent. In both sexes, it is a time of good health and of boundless energy. Dr. Hartwell's tables, compiled from a careful study of Boston children in the census years 1875, 1885 and 1890, show that the power to resist disease is highest in the twelfth year for girls and in the thirteenth year for boys.t *Hall: "Youth: Its Education, Regimen and Hygiene," p. 1. † Hartwell: Report of Director of Physical Training, 1894, School Document No. 8, Boston, Mass., cited in Tyler: "Growth and Education," p. 269. |