Herland Charlotte Perkins Gilman (ebook and pdf reader TXT) đ
- Author: Charlotte Perkins Gilman
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âYou put psychology with historyâ ânot with personal life?â
âOf course. It is ours; it is among and between us, and it changes with the succeeding and improving generations. We are at work, slowly and carefully, developing our whole people along these lines. It is glorious workâ âsplendid! To see the thousands of babies improving, showing stronger clearer minds, sweeter dispositions, higher capacitiesâ âdonât you find it so in your country?â
This I evaded flatly. I remembered the cheerless claim that the human mind was no better than in its earliest period of savagery, only better informedâ âa statement I had never believed.
âWe try most earnestly for two powers,â Somel continued. âThe two that seem to us basically necessary for all noble life: a clear, far-reaching judgment, and a strong well-used will. We spend our best efforts, all through childhood and youth, in developing these faculties, individual judgment and will.â
âAs part of your system of education, you mean?â
âExactly. As the most valuable part. With the babies, as you may have noticed, we first provide an environment which feeds the mind without tiring it; all manner of simple and interesting things to do, as soon as they are old enough to do them; physical properties, of course, come first. But as early as possible, going very carefully, not to tax the mind, we provide choices, simple choices, with very obvious causes and consequences. Youâve noticed the games?â
I had. The children seemed always playing something; or else, sometimes, engaged in peaceful researches of their own. I had wondered at first when they went to school, but soon found that they never didâ âto their knowledge. It was all education but no schooling.
âWe have been working for some sixteen hundred years, devising better and better games for children,â continued Somel.
I sat aghast. âDevising games?â I protested. âMaking up new ones, you mean?â
âExactly,â she answered. âDonât you?â
Then I remembered the kindergarten, and the âmaterialâ devised by Signora Montessori, and guardedly replied: âTo some extent.â But most of our games, I told her, were very oldâ âcame down from child to child, along the ages, from the remote past.
âAnd what is their effect?â she asked. âDo they develop the faculties you wish to encourage?â
Again I remembered the claims made by the advocates of âsports,â and again replied guardedly that that was, in part, the theory.
âBut do the children like it?â I asked. âHaving things made up and set before them that way? Donât they want the old games?â
âYou can see the children,â she answered. âAre yours more contentedâ âmore interestedâ âhappier?â
Then I thought, as in truth I never had thought before, of the dull, bored children I had seen, whining; âWhat can I do now?â; of the little groups and gangs hanging about; of the value of some one strong spirit who possessed initiative and would âstart somethingâ; of the childrenâs parties and the onerous duties of the older people set to âamuse the childrenâ; also of that troubled ocean of misdirected activity we call âmischief,â the foolish, destructive, sometimes evil things done by unoccupied children.
âNo,â said I grimly. âI donât think they are.â
The Herland child was born not only into a world carefully prepared, full of the most fascinating materials and opportunities to learn, but into the society of plentiful numbers of teachers, teachers born and trained, whose business it was to accompany the children along that, to us, impossible thingâ âthe royal road to learning.
There was no mystery in their methods. Being adapted to children it was at least comprehensible to adults. I spent many days with the little ones, sometimes with Ellador, sometimes without, and began to feel a crushing pity for my own childhood, and for all others that I had known.
The houses and gardens planned for babies had in them nothing to hurtâ âno stairs, no corners, no small loose objects to swallow, no fireâ âjust a babiesâ paradise. They were taught, as rapidly as feasible, to use and control their own bodies, and never did I see such surefooted, steady-handed, clearheaded little things. It was a joy to watch a row of toddlers learning to walk, not only on a level floor, but, a little later, on a sort of rubber rail raised an inch or two above the soft turf or heavy rugs, and falling off with shrieks of infant joy, to rush back to the end of the line and try again. Surely we have noticed how children love to get up on something and walk along it! But we have never thought to provide that simple and inexhaustible form of amusement and physical education for the young.
Water they had, of course, and could swim even before they walked. If I feared at first the effects of a too intensive system of culture, that fear was dissipated by seeing the long sunny days of pure physical merriment and natural sleep in which these heavenly babies passed their first years. They never knew they were being educated. They did not dream that in this association of hilarious experiment and achievement they were laying the foundation for that close beautiful group feeling into which they grew so firmly with the years. This was education for citizenship.
X Their Religions and Our MarriagesIt took me a long time, as a man, a foreigner, and a species of Christianâ âI was that as much as anythingâ âto get any clear understanding of the religion of Herland.
Its deification of motherhood was obvious enough; but there was far more to it than that; or, at least, than my first interpretation of that.
I think it was only as I grew to love Ellador more than I believed anyone could love anybody, as I grew faintly to appreciate her inner attitude and state of mind, that I began to get some glimpses of this faith of theirs.
When I asked her about it, she tried at first to tell me, and then, seeing me flounder, asked for more information
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