highway respired with an inner meaning. When the spirit of appreciation wells up in the poet, it knows no bounds. It reaches out and embraces all the manifold objects of nature, animate and inanimate, the high vibrating stars, the rolling ocean, the gorgeous clouds of sunset, the growing wheat, silent plants, and creatures dumb. For all of these the poet feels a high and tender kinship, endows them with one kindred impulse, and speaks in words of almost loving companionship to the mountain daisy or to the wee cowering beastie in the stibble. For Burns even the mousie is a poor earthborn companion and fellow mortal. Sidney Lanier, in his fervent poem, "Sunrise," addresses with affectionate appeal the "Sweet, burly barked, man-bodied trees, O beloved, my live oaks," and begs of their foliage to teach him the terms of silence. "Ye ministers meet for each passion that grieves, friendly, sisterly, sweetheart leaves!" Here appreciation rises to the ecstatic pitch of animistic comradeship. This is the poet's privilege and the child's inclination; for poets are childlike, and the child is by nature a poet. - The instinctive psychoses so intimately associated with touch make this sense extremely important for morality as well as æsthetic enjoyment. For morality has its being in our instinctive, impulsive, emotional attitudes, not only attitudes toward persons, but toward things, minerals, plants, and animals. In some inscrutable way refinement of sensibility is correlated with delicacy of moral sentiment, and coldness of perception with coldness of character. The very etymology and double connotation of adjectives like coarse, supple, dainty, rude, and delicate, betray a fundamental relationship between tactile and ethical qualities. Manners and wood both are smooth or polished; and conduct, lace, and wire may all be fine. It cannot be demonstrated in the laboratory, but undoubtedly the tactile tenderness with which a rough street boy handles a collection of delicate butterflies in some way irradiates into the sphere of general conduct and softens his deportment. There are tactile-ethical values in nature study and handwork the tactile attitudes of tenderness and protection which a boy feels for fragile birds' eggs carefully stored, perhaps with a caress, in cotton; the perfect polishing of a wood surface; the respect for the fiber and individual resistant qualities of material; the rounding of edges and corners for comfort and beauty; the obedience to lines, drawings, and so forth; the accuracy and truthfulness in fitting edges; the general submission to the laws of nature whenever a piece of raw material is attacked. We can suggest rather than demonstrate the important bearings of all this. See how a child will stroke a smooth surface with half awesome delight. What does it mean? It means that life is more than words. In due time, of course, the child should be able to speak and spell a declarative sentence, stating that the sensation felt exquisite. Sometime he may even discuss whether "rapturous" is a better adjective. - But, after all, the adjective is but a tag or a symbol. The sensation itself is unutterable. Character is made up of attitudes, appreciations; and verbal images, although very essential to abstract thinking, are idle and void unless they are born of concrete contact. The psychology of peoples has been molded by the great silent geographical and geological features ever present in their environment. The prairie is in the Indian, the mountain in the Swiss, the sea in the Eskimo. The qualities of things great and small, visual and auditory, but especially tactual, by some half-mystical process sink through the thin layer of the intellect into the deeper strata of the heart, especially the heart of the child. Since the process is half mystical it baffles descriptive psychology, but the poet seems to know how to tell it. The following is selected from a poem by Walt Whitman, which is one of the most understanding things ever written about childhood. There was a child went forth every day, And the first object he looked upon, that object he became, And that object became part of him for the day or a certain part of the day, Or for many years or stretching cycles of years. The early lilacs became part of this child, And grass and white and red morning-glories, and white and red clover, and the song of the phoebe bird, And the third-month lambs and the sow's pink-faint litter, and the mare's foal and the cow's calf, And the noisy brood of the barnyard or by the mire of the pond side, And the fish suspending themselves so curiously below there, and the beautiful curious liquid, And the water plants with their graceful flat heads, all became part of him. His own parents, he that had fathered him and she that had conceived him in her womb and birthed him, They gave this child more of themselves than that, They gave him afterward every day, they became part of him. The father, strong, self-sufficient, manly, mean, angered, unjust, The strata of colored clouds, the long bar of maroon-tint away solitary by itself, the spread of purity it lies motionless in, The horizon's edge, the flying sea crow, the fragrance of salt marsh and shore mud, These became part of that child who went forth every day, and who now goes, and will always go forth every day. It would spoil this poem to comment on it analytically. Could there be a finer statement of faith in education, of faith in the subtle power of all things upon the growing child? Heredity is only half. The teacher, too, becomes part of the child who goes forth every day to school, and in largest measure if she communicates to him a loving appreciation of the commonplace things which will always surround him. PART THREE THE PEDAGOGY OF THE PRIMARY SCHOOL CHAPTER IX DRAWING The period of childhood is a period of self-revealing expression. One of the most characteristic and interesting forms of such expression is drawing. Spontaneous drawing is really a form of play, and in the early years children need about as little instruction in drawing as they do in any play. It is instinctive for a child to test his powers, to externalize himself, to leave a mark. He takes instinctive delight in being a cause, and even before his first birthday he may seize a piece of chalk and scrawl with it. These earliest scribbles are of course an expression of the instinct of workmanship hardly less crude than the random, aimless kicking of legs and brandishing of arms in the crib. There may be an element of imitation in the activity, but there is no conscious purpose or design. The scribble period, according to Lukens, who studied and classified hundreds of children's spontaneous drawings, lasts until about the age of four. If a child did not rise to a higher type of expression in this time, it would be a case of arrested development. Just as his play becomes more and more expressive of ideas and models, so does his penciling; |