"What a wonderful reader you were as a child! and certainly the books you mention were far beyond you. Yet I can not quite agree that the habit of air-castle building is pernicious. Indeed I believe in it.
It needs only to be balanced by practical effort, directed towards furnishing an earthly foundation for the castle. Build, then, as high and splendid as you like, and love them so hard that you are moved to lay a few stones on the solid earth as a beginning of a more substantial structure; and some day you may wake to find some of your castles coming true. Those practical foundation stones underlying a tremendous tower of idealism have a genuine magic power. Build all you like about your baby, for instance. Think what things Mary pondered in her heart.
"No, I"m never worried about idealism except when it is contented with itself and makes but little effort at outward realization. But the fact that you are taking this course proves that you will work to realize your ideals.
"I don"t think it very bad either to read to "kill time." Though if you go on having a family, you won"t have any time to kill in a very little while. But do read on when you can, otherwise you may be shut in, first you know, to too small a world, and a mother needs to draw her own nourishment from _all_ the world, past and present."
DUTY TO ONESELF
"Yes, I should say you were distinctly precocious, and that you are almost certainly suffering from the effects of that early brilliancy.
But the degree was not so great as to permanently injure you, especially if you see what is the matter, and guard against repeating the mistakes of your parents. I mean that you can now treat your own body and mind and nerves as you wish they had treated them. Pretend that you are your own little child, and deal with yourself tenderly and gently, making allowances for the early strain to which you were subjected. So few of us American women, with our alert minds, and our Puritanic consciences, have the good sense and self-control to refrain from driving ourselves; and if, as often happens, we have formed the bad habit early in life, reform is truly difficult, but not impossible. We can get the good of our disability by conscientiously driving home the principle that in order to "love others as ourselves"
we must learn to _love ourselves as we love others_. We have literally no right to be unreasonably exacting toward ourselves,--but perhaps I am taking too much upon myself by preaching outside the realm of child study."
THE MOTHER AND THE TEACHER
"Your paper has been intensely interesting to me. I have always held that a true teacher was really a mother, though of a very large flock, just as a true mother is really a teacher, though of a very small school. The two points of view complete each other and I doubt if either mother or teacher can see truly without the other. They tell us, you know, that our two eyes, with their slight divergence of position, are necessary to make us, see things as having more than one side; and the mother and the teacher, one seeing the individual child, the other the child as the member of the race, need each other to see the child as the complex, many-sided individual he really is.
"In your school, do you manage to get the mothers to co-operate? Here, I am trying to get near my children"s teachers. They try, too; but it is not altogether easy for any of us. We need some common meeting ground--some neutral activity which we could share. If you have any suggestions, I shall be glad to have them. Of course, I visit school and the teachers visit me, and we are friendly in an arm"s length sort of fashion. That is largely because they believe in corporal punishment and practice it freely and it is hard for us to look straight at each other over this disagreement."
CORPORAL PUNISHMENT.
To the Matron of a Girls" Orphan Asylum
"Now to the specific questions you ask. My answers must, of course, be based upon general principles--the special application, often so very difficult a matter, must be left to you. To begin with corporal punishment. You say you are "personally opposed, but that your early training and the literal interpretation of Solomon"s rod keep you undecided." Surely your own comment later shows that part, at least, of the influence of your early training was _against_ corporal punishment, because you saw and felt its evils in yourself. Such early training may have made you unapt in thinking of other means of discipline; but it can hardly have made you think of corporal punishment as _right_.
"And how can anyone take Solomon"s rod any more literally than she does the Savior"s cross? We are bid, on a higher authority than Solomon"s proverbs, to take up our cross and follow Him. This we all interpret figuratively. Would you dream, for instance, of binding heavy crosses of wood upon the backs of your children because you felt yourselves so enjoined in the literal sense of the Scriptures? Why, then, take the rod literally? It is as clearly used to designate any form of orderly discipline as the cross is used to designate endurance of necessary sorrows. "The letter killeth, but the spirit maketh alive."
"As to your next question about quick results, I must recognize that you are in a most difficult position. For not the best conceivable intentions, nor the highest wisdom, can make the unnatural conditions you have to meet, as good as natural ones. In any asylum many purely artificial requirements must be made to meet the artificial situation.
Time and s.p.a.ce, those temporal appearances, grow to be menacing monsters, take to themselves the chief realities. Nevertheless, _so far as you are able_, you surely want to do the natural, right, unforced thing. And with each successful effort will come fresh wisdom and fresh strength for the next.
"Let me suggest, in the case you mention, of insolence, that three practical courses are open to you: one to send or lead the child quietly from the room, with the least aggressiveness possible, so as not further to excite her opposition, and to keep her apart from the rest until she is sufficiently anxious for society to be willing to make an effort to deserve it; or two, to do nothing, permitting a large and eloquent silence to accentuate the rebellious words; or three, to call for the condemnation of the child"s mates. Speaking to one or two whose response you are sure of first, ask each one present for a expression of opinion. This is so severe a punishment that it ought not often to be invoked; but it is deadly sure."
STEALING
"The question of honesty is, indeed, most difficult. I do not think it would lower the standard of morality to _a.s.sume_ honesty, as the thing you expected to find, to accept almost any other explanation, to agree with the whole body of children that dishonesty was so much the fault of dreadfully poor people who had nothing unless they stole it, that it could not be their fault, who had so much--couldn"t be the fault of anyone who was well brought up as they were. Emphasize, in story and side allusion, at all sorts of odd moments when no concrete desire called away the children"s minds, the fact that honesty is to be expected everywhere, except among terribly unfortunate people--of course a.s.suming that they with their good shelter and good schooling are among the fortunate ones. Then you will give each child not only plenty of everything, but things individualized, easily distinguished, and a place to put them in. I"ve often thought that the habit of buying things wholesale--so many dolls, all exactly alike, so many yards of calico for dresses, all exactly alike, leads, in inst.i.tutions like yours, to a vague conception of private property, and even of individuality itself. If some room could be allowed for free choice--the children be allowed to buy their own calicoes, within a given price, or to choose the tr.i.m.m.i.n.gs or style, etc. I feel sure the result would be a st.u.r.dier self-respect and a greater sense of that difference between individuals which needs emphasizing just as much as does the solidarity of individuals."
BIBLIOGRAPHY
BOOKS FOR MOTHERS
Fundamental Books (Philosophy of Education--Pedagogy)
The Science of Rights ($5.00, postage 30c), J.G. Fichte.
Education of Man ($1.50, postage 12c), Friedrich Froebel.
Mottoes and Commentaries of Froebel"s Mother Play ($1.50, postage 14c), translated by Susan E. Blow.
The Part Played by Infancy in the Evolution of Man ($2.00, postage 15c), from "A Century of Science," article by John Fiske.
How Gertrude Teaches Her Children ($1.50, postage 14c), Pestalozzi.
Levana, Bohn Library ($1.00, postage 12c), Jean Paul Richter.
Education ($1.25, postage 12c), Herbert Spencer.
General Books on Education
Household Education ($1.25, postage 10c), Harriet Martineau.
Bits of Talk About Home Matters ($1.25, Postage 10c), H.H.
Jackson.
Biography of a Baby ($1.50, postage 12c), Millicent Shinn.
Study of Child Nature ($1.00, postage 10c), Elizabeth Harrison.
Two Children of the Foot Hills ($1.25, postage 10c), Elizabeth Harrison.
The Moral Instruction of Children ($1.50, postage 14c), Felix Adler.