BACK PAGES:Theories about child-rearing can change with alarming rapidity. In 1900 The Irish Timeswas sceptical about some of the latest ideas and happy to see them questioned by an "expert".
IN THIS age of theories and experiments we are perpetually assailed – those of us who are parents, in particular – by some new and superior method of dealing with “the child” – as the scientific educationalists delight in calling him. We are gravely warned against over-exciting his budding intelligence by permitting over- familiarity with the alphabet, a complicated and difficult study to be postponed until such time as “the child” has learned, in the educational games of the kindergarten, to hop like a frog, swim like a fish, fly like a bee, and generally play in an instructive manner . . . The poor “child”, on whom more consideration is probably nowadays lavished than during any other period of the world’s history, is in danger of suffering so much from the over-attention of the pedant that, if he were allowed to express his own views and could foresee the future, he might well cry out to be saved from his friends . . .
We are inclined to see in the prevailing over-insistence on the new theories as all-in-all and infallible a new danger, and to fear lest “the child”, in falling into the hands of the pedants, may suffer an intellectual injury for which their system has made no provision.
We are glad, therefore, to find in the current Contemporary Reviewan able article from the pen of Dr Marcus Hartog, professor of natural history in Queen's College, Cork, in which he protests against one of the main assumptions of modern pedagogics – namely, that instruction must above all else be "logical and progressive".
At first sight this assumption would appear to have much to recommend it. In fact it is just one of those apparently obvious truths which the ordinary person is apt to swallow without question when he hears it put forward as one of the “planks” of a scholastic programme. He may be perfectly aware that his own education, tried by this strict test, would be found wanting, but he is all the more convinced that he is doing the best possible thing for his children in entrusting them to an educationalist who is able to produce a scientific basis for his operations. But now comes along Prof Hartog, who declares that the scientific basis, upon which so much depended, is inaccurately laid, for the simple reason that the scientific pedagogue has overlooked one of the most important factors in the materials with which he has to build ...
What he appears to be anxious to convey is that there is in the subconscious region of the human mind a faculty of very rapid adjustment and combination, or, as he terms it, of “interpolation”, which enables us to co-ordinate and classify our impressions and experiences by a spontaneous exercise of the memory. The word “instinctive”, to whose use Prof Hartog objects on scientific grounds, is perhaps the one which would soonest occur to the man in the street as descriptive of this process.
Granted, however, that the faculty is there, that it is far swifter and more certain in its operation than any mere process of reasoning, and that it is capable of almost infinite variety of development in different individuals, the error of applying to each child a uniform “logical and progressive” method is at once apparent.
Prof Hartog goes so far as to state frankly that the result of his speculation regarding this hitherto unrecognised factor of the memory has been to strengthen his disbelief in a good deal of a priori pedagogics, and his belief in “those empirical methods of teaching that have stood the wear and tear of centuries”.
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