Читать книгу Child Psychology I: Development in the First Four Years - Vilhelm Rasmussen - Страница 4

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For education, both at home and at school, it is of the utmost importance to know child nature accurately, body as well as soul; otherwise it is impossible to educate in a truly rational way—except by a lucky accident.

But it is difficult to learn to know child nature, since it is continually in the act of becoming different. The child is not an adult on a small scale, but a quite different human being, the more different the younger it is.

If the child were a little adult all would be simple. It would only be necessary to investigate the life of the adult’s soul in order to arrive at knowledge of such life in the child. And in earlier times this is just what was done. Children were regarded as small grown-up persons. This is shown in an amusing way by an illustration drawn by Chodowiecky in the eighteenth century. We see a schoolroom in which are a teacher and some children, all wearing wigs. The children are reduced editions of the teacher. And in accordance with this view, the education of that day was largely in error. The aim was to give children the interests of the adult as quickly as possible. The fact that this did not suit their age was not much taken to heart. That which did not go in by fair means was laid on with the rod. Learning, wide reading, was the ideal. The “able” child was the one that could best acquire extensive knowledge. The “good” child was the one which behaved as if it had an adult’s feelings and desires.

The first person who raised serious objections against this misunderstanding was Rousseau. He discovered the child in the child, and demanded that it should be allowed to live its own life. Children must have childhood: such was Rousseau’s fundamental thought.

Rousseau, however, and his immediate successors, did not know children from comprehensive and thorough observations. Each built first and foremost on his own personal experiences; and more than one writer on education has, in the main, proceeded from such a thought as this: “I was educated so badly that nothing much has come of me; but had I been educated in the way which I am now going to describe, the result would have been different and much better.” In addition to purely personal experience, the educational writers of that time had nothing to build on except scattered and casual observations of children. Consequently a large number of mistakes were mingled with the many excellent new points of view. Children are so different from each other. That which holds for one child does not apply to another. Inheritance and conditions of life give each a stamp of its own. Hence, in order that the typical and the universal may be brought into the light, it is necessary gradually to acquire accurate knowledge of many children. The more we know, the more certainly can the individual characteristics be separated from the universal traits, so that the general laws may be indicated.

For education, of course, it is not only the general that is of interest. Each particular child can be the better educated the more thoroughly its special nature is known. For the individual educator, especially for parents, the study of the individual child is thus no less full of significance than the study of the general characteristics.

This study of children began as early as the close of the eighteenth century; in 1787, Tiedemann published his observations on the development of the faculties of the soul in children.^[1] But this did not take matters very far, and no great improvement was made after Löbisch had written, in 1851, his History of the Development of the Child’s Soul, and Sigismund, in 1856, The Child and the World.^[2] Among other things, there was lacking a closer connection between psychology and physiology, but particularly a comprehensive, guiding principle to give significance to the separate observations and make it possible to compare them with other known phenomena—that is, to understand them. For this reason Kuszmaul’s Investigations on the Soul-life of the Newborn,^[3] which appeared in 1859, also failed to open an epoch.

In 1859, however, there was published Charles Darwin’s book On the Origin of Species, and this not only aroused a lively interest in the development of plants and animals, but gave the impulse to a host of investigations on development both in the inanimate and the animate world. No scientific hypothesis has in recent times exercised so fruitful an influence as the hypothesis of development; and its significance has not been least for the study of the soul life of man. Darwin himself wrote his book, On the Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals; and in a little essay contributed to Mind^[4] he communicated some of his observations on the development of children, particularly in their first year.

In the Revue Philosophique, Taine had previously published his observations on a child’s development in language.^[5] These, however, were still only advanced scouts heralding the later luxuriance of literature on children’s soul life.

The true founder of modern Child Study is W. Preyer,^[6] whose work, The Child’s Soul, rests on careful observations and experiments. For three years he kept a diary of his son’s development, and he conducted a large number of experiments for the purpose of elucidating the development of different faculties of the soul.

As the idea of development gradually extended among the sciences, child psychology became enriched with new points of view. Among other things, people learnt more and more to know the soul life of the animals, and the agreement which exists between stages in the child’s development and stages in the development which psychic life has achieved in various types of animals; and this agreement has been specially elucidated by J. M. Baldwin in a book on Mental Development in the Child and the Race.^[7] One is also often reminded of primitive races’ manifestations of the life of the soul and of the prehistoric life of the civilised races, when one observes the development of the child’s soul. Thus we have in this domain, just as in the case of purely physical development, three roughly parallel lines of development: (1) the development through progressive stages of civilisation—primitive, half civilised, and civilised peoples; (2) the corresponding development in the stages of civilisation within a particular civilised people; (3) individual development in children and adolescents. But great caution must be exercised in comparisons between children and adults—especially when they are of wholly different races. Phenomena of the same character need not always have quite the same causes. Water may be brought to boil either by an increase of temperature or by a diminution of atmospheric pressure.

Finally, during the last decades, child psychology has received a powerful impulse forward from experimental psychology, which rests on the close connection between the physiological and the psychological. To begin with, investigators no doubt confined themselves to adults; but as the problems were gradually cleared up, and the methods of investigation refined, the study was carried on to children, especially school-children; and by this means an extraordinarily rich fund of knowledge was acquired, which provides a far more solid basis for practical education than the speculative psychology of a former day and its uncritical transference to the soul life of children.

[1]	Tiedemann, Beobachtungen über die Entwicklung der Seelenfähigkeiten bei Kindern. 1787.

[2]	Löbisch, Entwicklungsgeschichte der Seele des Kindes. 1851. Sigismund, Kind und Welt. 1856.

[3]	Kuszmaul, Untersuchungen über das Seelenleben des neugeborenen Menschen. 1859.

[4]	Ch. Darwin, “A Biographical Sketch of an Infant,” Mind, Vol. II. 1877.

[5]	Taine, “Note sur L’acquisition du langage chez les Enfants et dans L’Espèce humaine,” Revue Philosophique, Nr. 1. 1876.

[6]	W. Preyer, Die Seele des Kindes. 1881. 5th ed. 1908.

[7]	Published 1895.