Gentle Measures in the Management and Training of the Young, Jacob Abbott [read me a book .TXT] 📗

has yet to tread, and not the infliction of pain, to impress upon him the evil of the missteps he made, in consequence of the obscurity, in the path behind him.

Indeed, in such cases as this, it is the influence of pleasure rather than pain that the parent will find the most efficient means of aiding him; that is, in these cases, the more pleasant and agreeable the modes by which he can impart the needed knowledge to the child—in other words, the more attractive he can make the paths by which he can lead his little charge onward in its progress towards maturity—the more successful he will be.

Ignorance of Material Properties and Laws.

In the example already given, the mental immaturity consisted in imperfect acquaintance with the qualities and the action of the mind, and the principles of sound reasoning; but a far larger portion of the mistakes and failures into which children fall, and for which they incur undeserved censure, are due to their ignorance of the laws of external nature, and of the properties and qualities of material objects.

A boy, for example, seven or eight years old, receives from his father a present of a knife, with a special injunction to be careful of it. He is, accordingly, very careful of it in respect to such dangers as he understands, but in attempting to bore a hole with it in a piece of wood, out of which he is trying to make a windmill, he breaks the small blade. The accident, in such a case, is not to be attributed to any censurable carelessness, but to want of instruction in respect to the strength of such a material as steel, and the nature and effects of the degree of tempering given to knife-blades. The boy had seen his father bore holes with a gimlet, and the knife-blade was larger—in one direction at least, that is, in breadth—than the gimlet, and it was very natural for him to suppose that it was stronger. What a boy needs in such a case, therefore, is not a scolding, or punishment, but simply information.

A girl of about the same age—a farmer's daughter, we will suppose—under the influence of a dutiful desire to aid her mother in preparing the table for breakfast, attempts to carry across the room a pitcher of milk which is too full, and she spills a portion of it upon the floor.

The Intention good.

[Illustration: THE INTENTION GOOD.]

The mother, forgetting the good intention which prompted the act, and thinking only of the inconvenience which it occasions her, administers at once a sharp rebuke. The cause of the trouble was, simply, that the child was not old enough to understand the laws of momentum and of oscillation that affect the condition of a fluid when subjected to movements more or less irregular. She has had no theoretical instruction on the subject, and is too young to have acquired the necessary knowledge practically, by experience or observation.

It is so with a very large portion of the accidents which befall children. They arise not from any evil design, nor even any thing that can properly be called carelessness, on their part, but simply from the immaturity of their knowledge in respect to the properties and qualities of the material objects with which they have to deal.

It is true that children may be, and often, doubtless, are, in fault for these accidents. The boy may have been warned by his father not to attempt to bore with his knife-blade, or the girl forbidden to attempt to carry the milk-pitcher. The fault, however, would be, even in these cases, in the disobedience, and not in the damage that accidentally resulted from it. And it would be far more reasonable and proper to reprove and punish the fault when no evil followed than when a damage was the result; for in the latter case the damage itself acts, ordinarily, as a more than sufficient punishment.

Misfortunes befalling Men.

These cases are exactly analogous to a large class of accidents and calamities that happen among men. A ship-master sails from port at a time when there are causes existing in the condition of the atmosphere, and in the agencies in readiness to act upon it, that must certainly, in a few hours, result in a violent storm. He is consequently caught in the gale, and his topmasts and upper rigging are carried away. The owners do not censure him for the loss which they incur, if they are only assured that the meteorological knowledge at the captain's command at the time of leaving port was not such as to give him warning of the danger; and provided, also, that his knowledge was as advanced as could reasonably be expected from the opportunities which he had enjoyed. But we are very much inclined to hold children responsible for as much knowledge of the sources of danger around them as we ourselves, with all our experience, have been able to acquire, and are accustomed to condemn and sometimes even to punish them, for want of this knowledge.

Indeed, in many cases, both with children and with men, the means of knowledge in respect to the danger may be fully within reach, and yet the situation may be so novel, and the combination of circumstances so peculiar, that the connection between the causes and the possible evil effects does not occur to the minds of the persons engaged. An accident which has just occurred at the time of this present writing will illustrate this. A company of workmen constructing a tunnel for a railway, when they had reached the distance of some miles from the entrance, prepared a number of charges for blasting the rock, and accidentally laid the wires connected with the powder in too close proximity to the temporary railway-track already laid in the tunnel. The charges were intended to be fired from an electric battery provided for the purpose; but a thunder-cloud came up, and the electric force from it was conveyed by the rails into the tunnel and exploded the charges, and several men were killed. No one was inclined to censure the unfortunate men for carelessness in not guarding against a contingency so utterly unforeseen by them, though it is plain that, as is often said to children in precisely analogous cases, they might have known.

Children's Studies.—Spelling.

There is, perhaps, no department of the management of children in which they incur more undeserved censure, and even punishment, and are treated with so little consideration for faults arising solely from the immaturity of their minds, than in the direction of what may be called school studies. Few people have any proper appreciation of the enormous difficulties which a child has to encounter in learning to read and spell. How many parents become discouraged, and manifest their discouragement and dissatisfaction to the child in reproving and complaints, at what they consider his slow progress in learning to spell—forgetting that in the English language there are in common, every-day use eight or ten thousand words, almost all of which are to be learned separately, by a bare and cheerless toil of committing to memory, with comparatively little definite help from the sound. We have ourselves become so accustomed to seeing the word bear, for example, when denoting the animal, spelt b e a r, that we are very prone to imagine that there is something naturally appropriate in those letters and in that collocation of them, to represent that sound when used to denote that idea. But what is there in the nature and power of the letters to aid the child in perceiving—or, when told, in remembering—whether, when referring to the animal, he is to write bear, or bare, or bair, or bayr, or bere, as in where. So with the word you. It seems to us the most natural thing in the world to spell it y o u. And when the little pupil, judging by the sound, writes it y u, we mortify him by our ridicule, as if he had done something in itself absurd. But how is he to know, except by the hardest, most meaningless, and distasteful toil of the memory, whether he is to write you, or yu, or yoo, or ewe, or yew, or yue, as in flue, or even yo as in do, and to determine when and in what cases respectively he is to use those different forms?

The truth is, that each elementary sound that enters into the composition of words is represented in our language by so many different combinations of letters, in different cases, that the child has very little clue from the sound of a syllable to guide him in the spelling of it. We ourselves, from long habit, have become so accustomed to what we call the right spelling—which, of course, means nothing more than the customary one—that we are apt to imagine, as has already been said, that there is some natural fitness in it; and a mode of representing the same sound, which in one case seems natural and proper, in another appears ludicrous and absurd. We smile to see laugh spelled larf, just as we should to see scarf spelled scaugh, or scalf, as in half; and we forget that this perception of apparent incongruity is entirely the result of long habit in us, and has no natural foundation, and that children can not be sensible of it, or have any idea of it whatever. They learn, in learning to talk, what sound serves as the name by which the drops of water that they find upon the grass in the morning is denoted, but they can have no clue whatever to guide them in determining which of the various modes by which precisely that sound is represented in different words, as dew, do, due, du, doo, and dou, is to be employed in this case, and they become involved in hopeless perplexity if they attempt to imagine "how it ought to be spelled;" and we think them stupid because they can not extricate themselves from the difficulty on our calling upon them to "think!" No doubt there is a reason for the particular mode of spelling each particular word in the language—but that reason is hidden in the past history of the word and in facts connected with its origin and derivation from some barbarous or dead language, and is as utterly beyond the reach of each generation of spellers as if there were no such reasons in existence. There can not be the slightest help in any way from the exercise of the thinking or the reasoning powers.

It is true that the variety of the modes by which a given sound may be represented is not so great in all words as it is in these examples, though with respect to a vast number of the words in common use the above are fair specimens. They were not specially selected, but were taken almost at random. And there are very few words in the language the sound of which might not be represented by several different modes.

Take, for example, the three last words of the last sentence, which, as the words were written without any thought of using them for this purpose, may be considered, perhaps, as a fair specimen of words taken actually at random. The sound of the word several might be expressed in perfect accordance with the usage of English spelling, as ceveral, severul, sevaral, cevural, and in many other different modes. The combinations dipherant, diferunt, dyfferent, diffurunt, and many others, would as well represent the sound of the second word as the usual mode. And so with modes, which, according to the analogy of the language, might as well be expressed by moads, mowdes, moades, mohdes, or even mhodes, as in Rhodes.

An exceptionally precise speaker might doubtless make some slight difference in the sounds indicated by the different modes of representing the same syllable as given above; but to the ordinary appreciation of childhood the distinction in sound between such combinations, for example, as a n t in constant and e n t in different would not be perceptible.

Now, when we consider the obvious fact that the child has to learn mechanically, without any principles whatever to guide him in discovering which, out of the many different forms, equally probable, judging simply from analogy, by which the sound of the word is to be expressed, is the right one; and considering how small a portion of his time each day is or can be devoted to this work, and that the number of words in common use, all of which he is expected to know how to spell correctly by the time that he is twelve or fifteen years of age, is probably ten or twelve thousand (there are in