Practical Education, Volume I. Edgeworth Maria
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it is not; for an humoured child in time plagues its attendant infinitely more than it would have done with reasonable management. If it were possible to convince nurses of this, they would sacrifice perhaps the convenience of a moment to the peace of future hours, and they would not be eager to quell one storm, at the hazard of being obliged to endure twenty more boisterous; the candle would then no more be thrust almost into the infant's eyes to make it take notice of the light through the mist of tears, the eternal bunch of keys would not dance and jingle at every peevish summons, nor would the roarings of passion be overpowered by insulting songs, or soothed by artful caresses; the child would then be caressed and amused when he looks smiling and good-humoured, and all parties would be much happier.
Practical education begins very early, even in the nursery. Without the mountebank pretence, that miracles can be performed by the turning of a straw, or the dictatorial anathematizing tone, which calls down vengeance upon those who do not follow to an iota the injunctions of a theorist, we may simply observe, that parents would save themselves a great deal of trouble, and their children some pain, if they would pay some attention to their early education. The temper acquires habits much earlier than is usually apprehended; the first impressions which infants receive, and the first habits which they learn from their nurses, influence the temper and disposition long after the slight causes which produced them are forgotten. More care and judgment than usually fall to the share of a nurse are necessary, to cultivate the disposition which infants show, to exercise their senses, so as neither to suffer them to become indolent and torpid from want of proper objects to occupy their attention, nor yet to exhaust their senses by continual excitation. By ill-timed restraints or injudicious incitements, the nurse frequently renders the child obstinate or passionate. An infant should never be interrupted in its operations; whilst it wishes to use its hands, we should not be impatient to make it walk; or when it is pacing, with all the attention to its centre of gravity that is exerted by a rope-dancer, suddenly arrest its progress, and insist upon its pronouncing the scanty vocabulary which we have compelled it to learn. When children are busily trying experiments upon objects within their reach, we should not, by way of saving them trouble, break the course of their ideas, and totally prevent them from acquiring knowledge by their own experience. When a foolish nurse sees a child attempting to reach or lift any thing, she runs immediately, "Oh, dear love, it can't do it, it can't! – I'll do it for it, so I will!" – If the child be trying the difference between pushing and pulling, rolling or sliding, the powers of the wedge or the lever, the officious nurse hastens instantly to display her own knowledge of the mechanic powers: "Stay, love, stay; that is not the way to do it – I'll show it the right way – see here – look at me love." – Without interrupting a child in the moment of action, proper care might previously be taken to remove out of its way those things which can really hurt it, and a just degree of attention must be paid to its first experiments upon hard and heavy, and more especially upon sharp, brittle, and burning bodies; but this degree of care should not degenerate into cowardice; it is better that a child should tumble down or burn its fingers, than that it should not learn the use of its limbs and its senses. We should for another reason take care to put all dangerous things effectually out of the child's reach, instead of saying perpetually, "Take care, don't touch that! – don't do that! – let that alone!" The child, who scarcely understands the words, and not at all the reason of these prohibitions, is frightened by the tone and countenance with which they are uttered and accompanied; and he either becomes indolent or cunning; either he desists from exertion, or seizes the moment to divert himself with forbidden objects, when the watchful eye that guards them is withdrawn. It is in vain to encompass the restless prisoner with a fortification of chairs, and to throw him an old almanack to tear to pieces, or an old pincushion to explore; the enterprising adventurer soon makes his escape from this barricado, leaves his goods behind him, and presently is again in what the nurse calls mischief.
Mischief is with nurses frequently only another name for any species of activity which they find troublesome; the love which children are supposed to have for pulling things out of their places, is in reality the desire of seeing things in motion, or of putting things into different situations. They will like to put the furniture in a room in its proper place, and to arrange every thing in what we call order, if we can make these equally permanent sources of active amusement; but when things are once in their places, the child has nothing more to do, and the more quickly each chair arrives at its destined situation, the sooner comes the dreaded state of idleness and quiet.
A nursery, or a room in which young children are to live, should never have any furniture in it which they can spoil; as few things as possible should be left within their reach which they are not to touch, and at the same time they should be provided with the means of amusing themselves, not with painted or gilt toys, but with pieces of wood of various shapes and sizes, which they may build up and pull down, and put in a variety of different forms and positions; balls, pulleys, wheels, strings, and strong little carts, proportioned to their age, and to the things which they want to carry in them, should be their playthings.
Prints will be entertaining to children at a very early age; it would be endless to enumerate the uses that may be made of them; they teach accuracy of sight, they engage the attention, and employ the imagination. In 1777 we saw L – , a child of two years old, point out every piece of furniture in the French prints of Gil Blas; in the print of the Canon at Dinner, he distinguished the knives, forks, spoons, bottles, and every thing upon the table: the dog lying upon the mat, and the bunch of keys hanging at Jacintha's girdle; he told, with much readiness, the occupation of every figure in the print, and could supply, from his imagination, what is supposed to be hidden by the foremost parts of all the objects. A child of four years old was asked, what was meant by something that was very indistinctly represented as hanging round the arm of a figure in one of the prints of the London Cries. He said it was a glove; though it had as little resemblance to a glove, as to a ribbon or a purse. When he was asked how he knew that it was a glove, he answered, "that it ought to be a glove, because the woman had one upon her other arm, and none upon that where the thing was hanging." Having seen the gown of a female figure in a print hanging obliquely, the same child said, "The wind blows that woman's gown back." We mention these little circumstances from real life, to show how early prints may be an amusement to children, and how quickly things unknown, are learnt by the relations which they bear to what was known before. We should at the same time observe, that children are very apt to make strange mistakes, and hasty conclusions, when they begin to reason from analogy. A child having asked what was meant by some marks in the forehead of an old man in a print; and having been told, upon some occasion, that old people were wiser than young ones, brought a print containing several figures to his mother, and told her that one, which he pointed to, was wiser than all the rest; upon inquiry, it was found that he had formed this notion from seeing that one figure was wrinkled, and that the others were not.
Prints for children should be chosen with great care; they should represent objects which are familiar; the resemblances should be accurate, and the manners should be attended to, or at least, the general moral that is to be drawn from them. The attitude of Sephora, the boxing lady in Gil Blas, must appear unnatural to children who have not lived with termagant heroines. Perhaps, the first ideas of grace, beauty, and propriety, are considerably influenced by the first pictures and prints which please children. Sir Joshua Reynolds tells us, that he took a child with him through a room full of pictures, and that the child stopped, with signs of aversion, whenever it came to any picture of a figure in a constrained attitude.
Children soon judge tolerably well of proportion in drawing, where they have been used to see the objects which are represented: but we often give them prints of objects, and of animals especially, which they have never seen, and in which no sort of proportion is observed. The common prints of animals must give children false ideas. The mouse and the elephant are nearly of the same size, and the crocodile and whale fill the same space in the page. Painters, who put figures of men amongst their buildings, give the idea of the proportionate height immediately to the eye: this is, perhaps, the best scale we can adopt; in every print for children this should be attended to. Some idea of the relative sizes of the animals they see represented would then be given, and the imagination would not be filled with chimeras.
After having been accustomed to examine prints, and to trace their resemblance to real objects, children will probably wish to try their own powers of imitation. At