A Dominie in Doubt Part 27

"At a very early age the child becomes aware through various processes that his own hand which he has seen moving across his line of vision is a part of himself, and that he can move it himself. He has discovered power. He then enters upon his career. The same motive that will govern his behaviour for the rest of his life comes into operation, and he wants to use this new-found power for some purpose that will increase his enjoyment of life. Up to this time he has had only one pleasure, and that was to do with the commissariat. Having discovered power over his fist he therefore wants to put it in his mouth . . . a difficult task requiring much practice and patient perseverance.

"As he goes on working he learns that his power increases with effort, and now his motive is modified. At first it was purely materialistic; he wanted to have his fist in his mouth. Now he wants to put it there.

His interest is in doing the thing rather than in having it.

"This is the spiritual element in his present desire, and now comes the first mistake in education. The mother, a.n.a.lysing the behaviour of the child, has noticed his complaint at the difficulty of the task as fatigue sets in, and, misunderstanding the motive of the child she helps him to put his fist in his mouth. But that is just what the child did not want, and he protests violently against this interference with his purpose in life.

"The mother again makes a false a.n.a.lysis of the situation, and concludes that his protest is the result of his disappointment that there is no nourishment in the fist. She then gives him food or paregoric, whatever may be her method of dealing with the spiritual unrest of her child, and thus drugs his creative faculties."

I have said that the infant is an egoist. If his egoism is allowed full scope he will enter upon the next stage of life, the self-a.s.sertive stage, with a huge capacity for being altruistic. This stage comes on about the age of six or seven. But if the child has had parents who believe in moulding character he will have had many severe lectures about his selfishness. These lectures will not have cured his selfishness; they will have driven it underground for the moment. The selfishness of adults is one result of the moral lecture in childhood, for no wish or emotion will remain buried for ever.

The age of self-a.s.sertion is the rowdy age, and naturally it is now that father uses his authority. The child is still ego-centric, but in a different way. At the age of three he was the king of the world; at the age of seven he is the king of the other boys who play with him.

He is now reckoning with society, and he uses society as a background against which he may play the hero. Thus be bleeds Jack's nose for no reason in the world other than that he thus a.s.serts himself. If he plays horses with the boy next door he insists upon being the driver.

It is at this period that he should be free from authority. If authority in the shape of father or teacher or policeman steps in to suppress his self-a.s.sertion the boy becomes an enemy of all authority and very often anti-social. The "rebel" in the Socialist camp is a good specimen of the man whose self-a.s.sertive period was injured by authority, and I suspect that the truculent drunk is letting off the steam that he should have let off at the age of eight.

The third stage in the evolution of a child is the adolescent stage.

For the first time the boy becomes a unit in society. Hitherto he has played for his own hand; his games have been games in which personal prowess was the desired aim. Now he feels that he is one of a team.

Even before p.u.b.erty the team-forming impulse is seen; Putter, for instance, in _The Boy and his Gang_, gives ten to sixteen as the gang age.

These divisions are purely arbitrary, and children differ much in evolution. The teacher, however, should have a general knowledge of these three phases. I have often seen a school prescribe cricket or hockey for boys who are still in the self-a.s.sertive stage. The result was that, having no team impulse, each boy had no further interest in the game when the umpire shouted: "Out!"

I used to umpire for boys and girls of eight to eleven, and it was a tiresome business. Quite often when a boy had been bowled with the first ball, he would throw down the bat in disgust and refuse to give the other side an innings. There was nothing wrong with the children; what was wrong was that a team phase game was being forced on a self-a.s.sertive phase group.

Duncan and two other dominies were in to-night and we got on to golf yarns. I remarked that there were very few good ones, and they all trotted out their favourites. I liked Duncan's best.

An oldish man was ploughing his way to the tenth hole at St. Andrews, and, when he ultimately holed out in nineteen, he turned to his caddie.

"Caddie," he cried in disgust, "this is the worst game I ever played."

The caddie stared at him open-mouthed.

"So ye _have_ played afore, have ye?" he gasped in amazement.

Why are there no cricket or football stories, I wonder? Possibly because they are team games; a team is a crowd, and I never heard of a joke against a crowd. A crowd is an impersonal thing, and no one can joke about an impersonal thing. I never heard of a joke about the moon or a turnip. Yet are there not jokes against a nation, and a nation is a crowd? Take the joke about the Scot who was brought up at Bow Street for being drunk and disorderly. The magistrate, before pa.s.sing sentence, asked the accused if he had anything to say for himself.

"Weel, ma lord, it was like this. I travelled frae Glesga to London yesterday, and I got into bad company in the train."

"Bad company?"

"Aye, ma lord. When I got into the train at Glesga Central I had twa bottles o' whuskey in my bag, and . . . a' the other men in my compartment was teetotal."

That looks like a joke against a long-suffering race, but is it so in reality? Make the traveller an 'Oodersfield' man on his way to see the Cup-tie Final at Chelsea, and it is not changed in essence. Only it has become a convention that the Scot is a hard drinker. It is the personal touch that makes the joke, and it is the individual that we laugh at.

I presume that the typical joke about Scots' meanness appeals to Englishmen because Englishmen are mean themselves. No joke appeals to a man unless it releases some repressed wish of his own. No one expects a devout Roman Catholic to see the point of a joke about extreme unction. The professional comedian to be a success must know what the crowd repressions are. d.i.c.kens is a great humorist because he knew by intuition what the crowd would laugh at. And that brings me to the subject of human types.

Broadly speaking there are two types of man. One is called an extrovert (Latin, to turn outwards); he identifies himself with the crowd, and he lives the life of the crowd. Lloyd George and Horatio Bottomley are typical extroverts; they seem to know instinctively what the crowd is thinking, and unconsciously they speak and act as the crowd wants them to speak and act. d.i.c.kens was another, and that is why he has so universal an appeal.

The other type, the introvert type, turns inward. They do not identify themselves with the crowd. What the public wants does not concern them; they give the crowd what they think it ought to want. This cla.s.s includes the thinkers, the men who are in advance of their time. An introvert is never popular with the crowd because the crowd never understands him. He can never get away from himself, and he sums up events according to the personal effect they have on himself. Yet to the unconscious of the introvert crowd opinion is of the greatest importance.

In the realm of humour the extrovert is a success; what amuses him amuses the crowds. But the introvert laughs alone, and in some cases he decides that the crowd has no sense of humour, and he becomes a cynic.

It is necessary that the teacher should be able to recognise the different types. The extrovert is popular; he it is who leads the gang. Doubts and fears do not trouble him; life is pleasant and he laughs his way through it. But the introvert is the boy who stands apart in a corner of the playground; he is timid and fears the rough and tumble of team games. He feels inferior and he turns in upon himself to find superiority. Thus he will day-dream of situations in which he is a hero like David Copperfield when he stood at Dora's garden gate and saw himself rescuing her from the burning house.

I think that the job of the teacher is to help each type to a position midway between introversion and extroversion. The boy who lives in the crowd might well be tempted to take more interest in his own individuality, and the introvert might well be encouraged to project his emotions outward.

To-night Mac told me a story about old Simpson the dominie over at Pikerton. Last summer an English bishop was touring Scotland, and one morning he drove up to Simpson's school in a big car, flung open the door and walked in.

"Good morning, children," he cried.

The bairns sat gazing at him in awe. He turned to Simpson.

"My good sir," he protested, "when I enter a village school in England, the children all rise and say: 'Good morning, sir'!"

"Possibly," said Simpson dryly, "but in Scotland children are not accustomed to see strangers walk into a school. Scots visitors always knock at the door and await the headmaster's invitation to enter."

Mac and I were talking about education to-night.

"I never heard you mention the teaching side of education," he remarked. "Giving a child freedom isn't enough, you know. What about History and Geography and so on?"

"I think they are jolly well taught in many schools, Mac," I said. "It is the psychological side of education that is a thousand years behind the times."

"Yes," said Mac doubtfully, "but suppose you have a school of your own, I presume you'd teach the English yourself?"

I nodded.

"How would you do it?"

I thought for a while.

"I'd reverse the usual process, Mac," I said. "Usually the teacher begins with Chaucer and works forward to d.i.c.kens; I would begin with _Comic Cuts_ and _Dead-wood d.i.c.k_ and work back to Chaucer."

"Oh, do be serious for once," he said impatiently.

"I am quite serious, Mac," I said. "The only thing that matters in school work is interest, and I know from experience that the child is interested in _Comic Cuts_ but not in the _Canterbury Tales_. My job is to encourage the boy's interest in _Comic Cuts_."

I ignored Macdonald's reference to idiocy, and went on.

"You see, Mac, what you do is this: you see a boy reading _Dead-wood d.i.c.k_, and you take his paper away from him and possibly whack the little chap for wasting his time. But you don't kill his interest in penny dreadfuls, and the result is that in later years he reads the Sunday paper that supplies the most lurid details of murders and outrages. My way is to encourage the lad to devour tales of blood and thunder so that in a short time blood and thunder have no more interest for him. The reason why most of the literature published to-day is tripe is that the public likes tripe, and it likes tripe because its infantile interest in tripe was suppressed in favour of Chaucer and Shakespeare."

"But," cried Mac, "isn't Shakespeare better for him than tripe?"

"Yes and no. If every poet were a Shakespeare the world would be a dull place; you need the tripe to form a contrast. The best way to enjoy the quintessence of roses, Mac, is to take a walk through the dung-heaps first."