Each of our children in turn, when old enough, was sent to a kindergarten. All enjoyed the little schools and we thought them useful in various ways. But we patronized only private ones. Children from intelligent and well-bred American homes in Montclair were in those years, and perhaps are still, practically shut out of the public kindergarten. We did, indeed, once make a few days’ trial of it with one of our little ones, but some of the colored and of the foreign-born children were ill mannered, filthy, and unsanitary. Very little children had no protection from them at all.
As early as the year 1895, or thereabouts, a very few of the most advanced towns in this country had partially adopted the modern scientific principles of education. 1 know of only three such towns, and one of these was Montclair. My associations with progressive educators had led me to study the newer and more scientific principles of education then just coming into vogue in Europe, and I was bent on carrying them out in the mental training of our children. The new ideas, so far as they were then adopted, we hailed in the Montclair schools, and we determined to spare neither pains nor expense in supplementing them at home.
The information that school books impart is not only useful but necessary, and books will no doubt continue to form the permanent material of instruction in all teaching institutions from the lowest to the highest. Nevertheless, the mind of the child grows not by absorbing the contents of books, but by intense, spontaneous, self-directed, mental action, just as the body of the child grows by intense, spontaneous, self-directed physical action in his plays. The mind and body are inseparable. They share a common life. Separable only in thought, each reacts constantly on the other. In fact the education of both springs from a single source, or rather from five sources, namely, the activities of the physical senses. These are the inlets and the outlets alike of the brain. The five senses are the sources of all feeling, all thought, all action, and even of consciousness itself. These purely physical roots of all mental growth our fathers overlooked.
In Montclair, as elsewhere, the change from the old education to the new consisted in the transfer of emphasis from education by books to the deliberate and studied training of the senses by engaging them in action. The physics and chemistry and natural history of the books, while not displaced, were supplemented in Montclair by physical and chemical laboratories, by out-of-doors nature studies, by tools and shops for iron and wood work, by practice of the domestic arts, by the introduction and encouragement of all sorts of out-of-doors plays for boys and girls, and by gymnastic exercises indoors, all under the direction of experts skilled in the scientific training of the senses. These changes involved great costs of many kinds in buildings, ground, app- paratus, and salaries. But they brought many compensating advantages. The practical value of mastery of shop tools and of some of the domestic arts was alone a complete justification. But the educational value of the skillful training of the senses afforded a still greater compensation. In later years the physical training of the schools is often carried to the mastery of various means of livelihood, and therefore these visible material results are popularly supposed to have been the purpose of the system. There are still among us educational fundamentalists who denounce the new education as a mixture of materialism and greed, a sign of the decadence of education and of civilization. But the material results thus denounced, while valuable in themselves, are with the modern educator the merest by-products. He trains the senses in all the multiplied activities of the modern school, college, and university, because the training of and through the senses is Nature’s way of developing the powers of the mind. The critics of athletics, for illustration, forget that what they denounce as mere physical play is a true and swift method of stimulating mental growth.
Such was the system of training welcomed by us in the Montclair public schools. It was thoroughly efficient, and made thoroughly enjoyable besides. But, according to plan, we supplemented the schools with twice as much self-directed work and play outside the school hours. We made it a rule to provide at home all the tools, and all the chemical, physical, and electrical equipment, apparatus, and material that our children wanted. The work which was within the range of the home afforded excellent training in endless variety. We even allowed them instruments of extreme delicacy and precision. Frederick constructed the first wireless of Montclair, and demonstrated it by invitation before the high school. He and a neighbor boy, now a professor at Yale, set up a private telegraph line between their homes. As a child Frederick became an expert photographer, and mastered every department of the art. Frank, then as now, excelled in artistic cabinet work. Russell as a boy was especially fond of nature studies. He knew every tree in this latitude by its leaf, every bird by its plumage, its song, and its nest. Percival developed extraordinary mechanical analysis and ingenuity in early childhood, brought out by his association with his busy and eager older brothers. The girls, too, developed dexterities in their own more domestic lines of instruction. How enjoyable their school work was is illustrated by their carrying it forward spontaneously out of school hours. With all the children, it was not enough that their teachers spent hours with them in nature studies in the woods. They spent many a spare hour in carrying them on by themselves. They learned every foot of the park on the mountain as far south as Eagle Rock, and much of the varied life of animals, insects, and plants within it, and were full of the lore of flowers and shrubs, and berries, moths, and cocoons. Frank made a large collection of butterflies and moths which was long preserved for its brilliancy and beauty. Girls and boys alike were scientifically trained in the games then in vogue. Football I discouraged, but we constructed a tennis court, for I thought tennis in many ways the best game for training the senses, beside affording collateral advantages. All our children have excelled in this, as did Lucia in dancing, even as a child. Besides this training of the senses in the new education, the children were given the usual introduction in books. But with the exception of Frederick and perhaps Alice, our children at this early period, like nearly all others, took only a perfunctory interest in the study of books.
These chapters are not the annals of our family. There are such private reminiscences of our family life, and such only, as promise to be useful to our future generations. We shall have occasion in the chapters that follow to illustrate further the advantages of the modern scientific system of education, and will find in the sequel its complete vindication.
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Chapters In My Life 