NAUGHTY CHILDREN

BY ELMER ELLSWORTH BROWN, PROFESSOR OF SCIENCE AND ART OF TEACHING, UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA

Whether a child is really naughty or not, in any given instance, depends on the point of view. The most of us can remember times when we were ourselves called naughty by censorious elders, altho to ourselves we were nothing of the sort. If our command of language had been equal to the tumult of our feelings, we should have said that we were deeply injured; we were engaged in the endless battle for human rights, and our elders were arrayed against us. For myself I will not presume here to speak for others —I can remember other instances in which I was fully conscious of my own naughtiness. I wanted to be naughty, and doubtless I succeeded admirably.

Let us see what it means that the child sometimes thinks he is injured when those who are better informed call him naughty. Our goodness. and badness arise out of our relations with other persons. The type of all badness is selfishness. Badness is essentially the exalting of the lesser above the greater; the preferring of the immediate interests of the one or the few to the permanent good of all. So our goodness is not merely an abstract purpose or intention of doing right; it is conditioned by our knowledge, and by our ability to personalize our knowledge-to bring it home to our real human life. The naughty person contents himself with the narrow view of what he himself or his immediate circle wants, and wants now. The person who is less naughty takes into account what is good for a larger circle of persons; and not only what is (apparently) good for them now, but what will be good for them in the future as well. Now, the view of little children is not only narrow, but fragmentary and perpetually shifting. One of them will be found now self-centered to the last degree, ready to sacrifice everything in the world, whether belonging to himself or to others, in order to gain possession of a mess of sticky candy; again the same child will seem to take a view perfectly chimerical in its breadth and elevation. There are times when a child sees so clearly the immediate object of his desire, and is so blind to everything else, that whatever hinders him from its enjoyment seems to him the height of tyranny. The sense of injustice rankles like poison in the minds of many children. I can remember hardly anything else that stirred me so deeply in my own childhood. The problem of the teacher at this point is the problem of leading the child out into the larger view. And the chief difficulty which presents itself is the difficulty of coming down to a sympathetic recognition of his present limitations, without cheating him of his right to training for higher things.

The place of the school among the institutions of society may give us a suggestion here. The school stands, in a sense, midway between the home and the state. The child, to be sure, is at the same time a member of the school, the state, and the family. But the day that he first goes to school is a turning-point in his life. It is the day that he takes his first great step from a life in which his home is all in all toward a larger life in which the complex of relations which we call the state will become real and significant for him. His home has been for him the ordered universe, surrounded by a chaos of things that have no father and mother. He has had some glimpse of other families, to be sure, and has very likely learned to fear the policeman. But for the most part the outer world is an unexplored wilderness. It has not yet dawned upon him that the family, which is his world, is constituted and protected as a member in a larger society. The school, and particularly the kindergarten and the primary school, is for him an intermediate stage by which he may be led gently and surely to a consciousness of his wider relationships. It shows him a society in which there is a head who is not father or mother; in which there are other pursuits and other rewards and punishments than those of the home; in which his duties, aims, associations, and enjoyments are different. It is a great mistake to suppose that any school should be "just like a home." It discharges its function only in being unlike a home. To bring the child into new relations and take him out of his absorption in the interests of a very small circle, is a part of the real business of the school.

This statement should, of course, not be taken to imply that the school must break suddenly and sharply with the home. Such a change would. be disastrous to the peace of mind of some children and to the manners and minor morals of others. But the school certainly should enlarge the range of the child's interests and duties.

Such a change involves a great deal of readjustment. The new interests are not to be substituted for the old, but added to the old. The old interests are to be newly interpreted in the larger experience of the child. Things that were pleasing and satisfying in the home before will now take a lower place in the child's estimation; and vice versa. With all these changes, he will find that things which were not regarded as naughty before are now very naughty indeed. Altogether, the transition involves much that is painful to the child and to his family friends, along with much that is delightful; but it is the delight and the pain of enlarged experience.

The difficulty of this transition brings into sharp relief all of the defects of early training in the home. Sound moral training shows itself, too, in various ways. One of the evidences of such soundness appears in a kind of moral plasticity. It is possible for a child of five or six to have become somewhat hardened in wrong courses of conduct. Such hardening

appears when some one narrow set of interests, usually in the nature of self-indulgence, gets the mastery, unchecked by other strong interests, or by the growing sense of obligation. Most children come up to school age without any such single overmastering interest. They like good things to eat, like to see new and strange sights, like to hear wonderful stories, like to use their limbs in all sorts of free play, like to make things (or still more, perhaps, to un-make things), like to play with other children, like to be praised, and like a great many other things. But each of these likings is kept from being inordinate by other, counter-balancing likings which are growing up with it. I think those who observe children closely are often struck, for a single example, with the fact that the liking for sweets and other toothsome things, while it may be present clearly enough, does not in normal children run riot and dominate over other interests. This checking of single interests, so that no one enjoys a full mastery, is what I mean by the moral plasticity of a school child. Whatever partial hardening of tendency the child may have brought to school with him speedily appears in some form of naughtiness. It may be the sense of private ownership has become unduly strong in one. If he is the only child in a well-to-do family, his unwillingness to share with others may not have been noticed before. But in the school he is surrounded by many others, and good comradeship and peace are possible only if the spirit of free co-operation is abroad. The child whose care for the things he calls his own is carried to an extreme soon comes into collision with other children, and the teacher has a case of naughtiness to attend to which the child does not at first understand to be naughtiness at all.

One great service, then, which the school must do the child is to give him a larger and clearer view of what is right and what is wrong.

I would not be understood as saying that this is all. There is another sort of hardening which is sometimes to be observed even in children of four or five a kind of set determination to follow their own choice, even tho they already know, more or less vaguely, that it is wrong. I suspect that, even in the most extreme cases of this sort, a clearer understanding of the difference between goodness and badness is one large element in the correction of the wrong. But it is not all. The disposition to do what is recognized as right must be strengthened, the habit of right action established. "Childhood is the time for rules and for mechanical drill in the habit of obedience," as Professor Coe remarked in his paper on "The Morbid Conscience of Adolescents." Should obedience be required in the kindergarten? Yes, if the kindergarten is a human institution. In all of the other institutional relations into which they enter in life the children will find laws which they are to obey, and compulsion in some sort or other to insure obedience. If the kindergarten does not have this wholesome and necessary element, it does not prepare

for the real world of institutions into which these same children are to grow.

We speak, properly enough, of children's rights. One of the most sacred of these is the right to be taught the lesson of obedience.

But let us return to the consideration of such naughtiness as results in large measure from ignorance of new relations which have arisen in the life of the child. Every little while some new experience brings home the conviction that the lack of knowledge has a large place in the bad. ness of little children. A striking illustration appears in the story of a child taken from a home for infants, as told by Mary Florence Munro in the Educational Review for last November :

She has a vivid imagination [says the narrator] which, joined to weak perceptions and a strong love of approbation, made her a true-born liar, if ever a child could be called one. . . . . She was such a loving little soul, she wanted to do so exactly right, and was always so penitent, that it seemed hard to find the secret of the trouble, until, one day, when an unusually grave lecture had been read to her on her besetting sin, she quavered out: "But what is truf ?" . . . . The lectures were cut short, and it was taken as an accepted fact in the family that it was hard for their baby to tell the truth, that everyone was trying to help her, and that little Mary was trying to learn to see things and then tell them exactly as they were. ... Often at first, when there was some doubt as to the truth of some statement, the listener would placidly inquire :' "Did you think that time, little girl?" When she would reply, “I don't fink I finked it quite right that time, but it was like vis;" when the correction would be received with: "I am so glad you told it straight this time; keep on trying, and some day you can tell it right every time." At eight years of age she was a truthful child.

I find something very touching in the picture of that little one asking in all seriousness the question which Pilate asked with flippant cynicism long ago. It surely suggests the need of patient and sympathetic instruction in the meaning of morals-a need not unknown to children of a larger growth.

The saying, "All things whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so unto them," has a depth of wisdom which is hard to fathom. It lays decisive emphasis upon that sympathetic entering into another's point of view which is the root of much that is finest in our courtesy and our morality. It is the spirit of this saying which has so wrought upon the people of modern Christendom that the most impartial historians see a great change coming to light within the past two or three centuries, men becoming less cruel, more sensitive to the sufferings of others. Some children develop a morbid sensitiveness to others' woes at an early age. But for the greater number there is much need of patient teaching at this point. They need to put the discomfort and injury which they cause alongside of that which they themselves have suffered, in order that they may realize that their own conduct is wrong. It takes skillful teaching to do this without overdoing it. And one chief element of such teaching is timeliness. The right word at the right moment will give to many a child a new and enlarged view, and so help him really to

begin taking account of others' good as well as of what he believes to be his own.

It is always in place to caution teachers against assuming that a given appearance is naughtiness without stopping to see what has caused it; and this may be taken as the moral of my paper. Those who work in charity kindergartens in the poorer parts of our cities well know what strange conditions may be found at the bottom of even a five-year-old's seeming perversity. Lack of food, lack of sleep, whisky, vicious surroundings at home as well as on the streets, the lack of common cleanliness, and a hundred other things, are all too common discoveries which reward their inquiry. When children come from homes of the well-to-do, different causes are found to be at work, causes sometimes quite as productive of naughtiness as those noted above. A particularly difficult condition to deal with is that in which the parent comes to the teacher to ask for special indulgence for a child who is already suffering from over-indulgence at home. In fact, the school has much to do in correcting-unobtrusively, let us hope-the mistakes of home training.

We should add, in all humility, that there are homes in which much is done to correct the errors of school training. The teacher needs not only to look to the genesis of naughtiness in any given instance, but also to guard against calling that naughtiness which is not really wrong. The reading of history should make us thoughtful on this point. We know that men have been punished again and again, by legal process, for acts which we see now to have been evidence, not of criminal intent, but of the most exalted virtue. If the little histories of the schools could be fully written, they would show sad instances of children's being made to suffer, not for the wrong, but for the good that was in them. The school and the state must enforce wholesome order with firmness and decision; but many mistakes may be prevented in both the school and the state by the exercise of great care to distinguish goodness in the making from fully accomplished wickedness.

A clear appreciation of the fitful and spasmodic elements which appear in the process of human development is of use at this point. It is safe to assume that no child is distinctly and finally naughty. He may be guilty of naughtiness, but you cannot read his character from single acts. There was nothing that I rebelled against more strongly in my childhood than the summing up of my character in this way. I neglected something that I ought to have done, and was told that I was the most heedless boy that my accuser had ever seen. I admitted the neglect in the given instance, but swelled with indignation at being called a heedless boy. I remember trying to voice my protest, but was unable to frame it in words. I did not know just what my objection was, but I felt it all thru me in a tumult of passion and rage. As I look back on it now, it seems that I was trying to say: "You must not generalize me into a bad