The Soul of A Child

Extract

The presence or lack of certain philosophical or religious preoccupations at any period has a great deal to do with the prevailing attitude towards children and their education.

In primitive or spontaneous forms of human society the child is not a special subject of study. Children are naturally and roundly brought up in the large circle of the home, with its traditional wisdom and salutary rough and tumble.

In many of the Greek states, where political life was allpervasive, it was inevitable that educational theories should emphasize the primary importance of education for citizenship—a phase reproduced for us in modern states such as Italy and Germany.

A Jansenistic theology once darkened men’s outlook on human nature and, in consequence, on its budding period. This gloom and the severity which harmonized with it persisted throughout the Victorian age. It was a time when children were habitually treated as criminals latae sententiae, an evil and perverse generation, to be repressed and chastized without mercy and without truce. For men of this epoch the child was, before all, a nuisance. It had no proper place in an adult world. A child (as Maria Montessori points out) was not to sit on the grown-ups’ chairs. Nor was it to sit on the stairs. Hence, having no chair of its own, it could sit down only when some big person condescended to offer it the hospitality of a pair of knees.