A Charter for Children

Cheiron's Cave : the School of the Future. An Educational Synthesis based on the New Psychology. By Dorothy Revel. (Heinemann. 7s. 6d.) THE sub-titles convey sufficiently explicitly the aims of this arresting book. It is a work that parents should not neglect, for new ideas in education are abroad in the land, and only two courses are possible to those of us who have

the welfare of children at heart ; these modern principles must either be understood and adapted to our needs, or they must be understood and opposed.

Any half-hearted attitude is dangerous, for the ideas themselves are dangerous. We must accept or deny : for ourselves, we have no doubt which to do. The New Psychology (as the author observes, it is, in fact, a restate- ment of ancient truths with the labels we love in the West) must be understood and adapted to our educational needs and to the needs of the future. We need not adhere precisely to Miss Revel's methods, but we must accept her central thesis : that children need guidance rather than control from their elders, and that the way of their development lies parallel to the history of mankind, from cave-man to city cleric.

As closely as space allows we shall adhere to the author's argument, for the book is too well planned to permit the reviewer to improve on her exposition. What, first, are the labels of the New Psychology ? Miss Revel follows Herr Jung. We have the extravert (Hotspur) and the introvert (Hamlet), each functioning on four planes—the sensational, emotional, intuitional, and intellectual. The normal person is both introvert and extravert : balance between the two makes for an harmonious personality. Intellect is the House of Lords of the human system, capable of consideration and discussion ; intuition is the House of Commons, the determining body that will have its way in the end. We cannot rule our life by intellect alone. To do so is to fly in the face of a hundred thousand years of evolution.

This is elementary, yet not sufficiently considered in the average education of children. We feed young minds with ideas they cannot assimilate. We force on them standards which are suitable to adult Europeans, but inapplicable to the little savages which they are and should be. We teach children what we think they ought to think, instead of telling them what they want to know. Mesdames Montessori, Mason, and Parkhurst, Homer Lane, Sanderson of Oundle, and many others have been pioneers in the search for a better method, and have taken our children along paths of freedom and common sense. In Germany, where the " Youth Movement " has reached remarkable development, Herr Wyneken, the head-master of a co-educational and self-governing school, was made Prussian Minister for Educa- tion. The noble work of Sir Robert Baden-Powell should not be forgotten : for ourselves we count it among the greatest works for children of any time or land since Christ. The " slave " education of yesterday, under which we adults grew, is becoming a thing of the past. What shall take its place ?

In the vanguard of "free schools " is Priory Gate, King's Lynn, where the author forms part of a school community which has grown up from a group of families who settled together in the country for mutual education, not only their children's education, but their own. Any teaching which is complete at the age of eighteen is no education at all. We must grow or wither. Yet the main purpose was the education of children along modern lines :-

A child " is born at the stage of development approximately corresponding to that of early man, and in his growth from birth to adult life he follows out roughly the history of the develop- ment of mankind to the present day. There is no short cut for him. If external pressure forces him to omit any of these stages, his growth slows down. It may even bo hold up altogether. He keeps harking back to the stage he has omitted. He lives it in dreams and wherever conscious control is weakened, as in illness, under an anaesthetic, or at the coming of old age."

This is the " recapitulatory theory." Our children must live through the Stone Age, the Bronze and Iron Ages, and so from mediaevalism to motor bicycles.

We are all of us giving out or taking in energy, physical and psychic—the uglily-named libido of the psychologists. With children we must be very careful not to give them an overdose of adult energy. They should generate their own driving power. Living on the approbation of its elders may easily turn a promising child into a prig, as we all know. And here we would observe that many of the counsels in Miss Revel's book are already well known to sensible parents, although not, perhaps, in their scientific dress.

We all know that children have primitive instincts, such as a desire to hunt and kill. What is not so generally admitted is that these instincts are right and proper for their age, and are only suppressed at grave danger to the child. A child will want to play with dirt, he will want to examine his own body and the bodies of others. Up to the age of four he will have lived on the sensational plane ; then emotion dawns. At eight he begins to be intuitive. Some time between the twelfth and fifteenth year he is conscious of intellect. Exceptions, of course, there are. We know of a distinguished writer who studied the Bible when she was three, and is none the worse for it. Macaulay was an infant prodigy. But such brilliant intellects merely prove the rule that a leisurely development of the faculties makes, on the whole, for strength and sanity. The dull boy at school is as likely to become a master mind as the prize pupil, who often belies the promise of his early years.

To deal with the phases of childhood, the following divisions have been adopted at Priory Gate :—Babes, up to five years of age ; Elves, from five to eight ; Woodlings, from eight to twelve ; Trackers, from twelve to fifteen ; Path- finders, from fifteen to eighteen ; and three later divisions, with which we have not space to deal. Of these ages, that of the Elves is the most important, for it is then that the danger of over-love or over-severity leaves, its indelible mark. Young Elves, or Babes, are encouraged to paddle and play, to decorate their nursery like Cromagnon men, to bathe naked in sun and stream, and to explore the world intensively rather than extensively. They belong to the earth and require first-hand contact with nature. If they are allowed to do so, they will go barefoot even through snow.

Bigger Elves, approaching the age of eight, are at the dawn of community-life, and begin testing relationships with each other on the emotional as well as the physical plane. Fighting on a small scale begins now, and would develop into battles with fists and stones as it did in Renaissance schools if the activity is not directed into organized games. We find at this age the foreshadowing of courage, with its obverse, fear. The Elves will search for dead hedgehogs, rats, and mice, and bring them in triumph to the house, for their prototypes lived chiefly on carrion. It is the age of fear and an adult that chases children to amuse them will find himself identified with a wolf or bear.

After the age of eight, the child becomes a Woodling and his intuition develops. He has become a hunter now, and will be grateful if shown how to kill accurately, quickly, humanely. (" If no one but children killed birds, or took birds' eggs, the damage done to wild life would not be insupportable.") The home-making instinct appears, and a tendency to steal. On winter evenings Woodlings knit, sew, do basket-work, and model in clay. It is the age of myth and fable.

Trackers, from twelve to fifteen, have now passed through the physical stage of the Elves and the tribal instincts of the Woodlings. They are in transition from being members of an organized horde to the individualism of the Pathfinder. They want to hunt " big game," like their Bronze Age ancestors. They will track rabbits and hares, go out with air-gun and catapult, and make themselves a nuisance tt their neighbours. This is the " difficult age " of upheaval4 for now that intellect has dawned, the child's nature is foi the first time functioning on all four planes. Mental over- feeding is a danger at this stage, and Miss Revel gives 3 heartfelt and by no means unnecessary warning to teachers and parents who would produce prize intellectual pigs. During these early years of adolescence a desire for differentia- tion in dress takes place, and the sexes tend to keep apart. This is the nomad age and the age of the horde. Team games are enthusiastically played : there is much camping and little bookwork.

Of the Pathfinders, from fifteen to eighteen, we cannot say much, for their education, while still along the same lines, must be based largely on the profession they are to adopt. This is the age of self-hood and sex-experiment. Within strict limits it is probably desirable that boys and girls should know each other as intimately as the brothers and sisters of the big families of the past knew each other. Unhappy marriages are often due to the " parent-attach- ments " formed by children of small families. Miss Revel says that there is a real danger in mothers concentrating all their affection on three or four children, whereas Nature meant it to be spread over thirteen or fourteen.

Not a word is said throughout the book as to natural diet. What is the food at Priory Gate ? Primitive man, if gin and Worcester sauce had been presented to him, would probably have poisoned himself with them. Are children to eat and drink what they like, or are they to live on grains and water like healthy savages ? How far is freedom, so difficult for the civilized adult, desirable for civilized children ? Miss Revel does not entirely convince us that children, even those of tender years, should be allowed unlimited licence. If they are never punished for their mistakes, will there not be something unreal in their childhood, something utterly at variance from the world in which they will have to live as adults ?

How closely, again, does the education of the average modern English boy of well-to-do parents conform to Miss Revel's ideals ? More closely, perhaps, than she thinks. The father does not consciously give his son a Bronze Age release of energy, but he knows it is good for Tommy to have a gun in his holidays. And Tommy's masters and prefects do not guard against the extraversion of surplus libido on his behalf : they cane him if he is slack instead of worrying about his immortal soul, and the system really works fairly well. It is true, however, that there are minds maimed and broken even at our public schools, and doubly true that the children of the poorer classes have neither the freedom nor the space necessary to their development during adolescent life. Theirs is a harder lot to fight against than that of slum children, who are not over-fed (God knows !) and not overwashed, and who have the vivid panorama of the streets as playground, in some ways a better training (sad as it is) than the coddling of nurses or the fussing of parents who fear to let their children play, lest they tear their clothes.

We have, on the whole, done less than justice to Miss Revel's book, and have not been able to comment on her interesting chapter on the training of teachers, nor on her inquiry into the religious needs of children. Some of her theories are highly contentious, but they are all-important. She writes as one who has seen the Kingdom of Heaven in a child's eyes.