The Demands That Surge in Every Child's Breast

— Our role as parents and educators is guidance and direction.
— The essence of education is the provision of our children's physical, mental, and psychological needs, and the answering of their natural demands, which are their right in life.

Every child born into this existence brings with him, to his parents and to his society, a surprise — nay, many surprises. What physical, mental, and psychological potentialities does this child or that carry within him? What are the gifts and aptitudes latent in him, and what are the qualities and traits that will together make up his personality? These are questions stirred up by hope and sharpened by anxiety, while the answers to them remain plans and models that we draw in our imaginations, fixing the ways of carrying them out. How many castles have we built, and how many hopes have been torn down, for no reason but that we do not know — or sometimes refuse to know — that our children's lives are not subject to our will, our dreams, and our wishes, but to their own will, their own needs, and their own wishes; that our duty as educators is to guide, to direct, and to provide the opportunities for growth, letting each one grow according to his aptitudes, his capacities, and his inclinations; and that our aims may differ from their aims, our demands from their demands, and our gifts from their gifts, so that we cannot realize through them what we could not realize ourselves, nor bring them to the ideal we ourselves failed to attain. Rather we must leave them room to realize themselves according to their gifts, their hopes, the needs of their society, and the requirements of life in their own age.

Often we err in defining our role as parents or as educators, imagining that we must work miracles if we are to have done the role justice and performed our duty toward our children; so we lay down rules and laws drawn from fanciful educational theories, wearying ourselves and vexing our children in the attempt to apply them, and producing results that are often far indeed from the results intended. Yet if we looked closely into the principles of education and its psychological and social foundations, we should find that education is a simple process, easy to apply once we have understood its purport and its aims. In its essence it is a provision of our children's physical, mental, and psychological needs, and an answer to their natural demands, which are their right in this life. And if we wish to define these needs and demands, relying upon modern scientific studies, we can imagine our children addressing to us something very like this appeal:

Love us with a deep and all-embracing love, and watch over the soundness of our bodies, our minds, and our souls; but beware lest you make of this love and this constant vigilance a barrier to our living the life of work, activity, movement, and trial. Surround us with tenderness and affection; grieve at our griefs and rejoice at our joys; and secure for us the calm, merry atmosphere that brings happiness and peace to our hearts. Accept us as our creating Father gave us to you, with what is in us of beauty and perfection and what is in us of shortcomings; and do not require of us that we be what we cannot be, or do what we cannot do.

Answer our questions with honest, true answers, however many and however varied those questions may be. Answer us with respect for us, for our thinking, for our curiosity, and for our longing after knowledge.

Allow us to keep company with children of our own age and to invite them to our home, to romp and make merry with them; and shut your eyes, now and then, to the tidiness of the house and the arrangement of its furniture.

Open to us the fields of inquiry and discovery, and do not be too angry if this should lead to the spoiling of a vessel, the breaking of a pair of scissors, or the ruin of some contrivance.

Do not worry overmuch about the cleanliness and neatness of our clothes, or the cleanness of our hands and faces; and do not shackle our freedom of play and movement for the sake of such considerations.

Let us sometimes talk at the top of our voices and laugh with all our hearts, without letting our shouting and our din disturb you.

Allow us to show our feelings frankly, even if those feelings sometimes express hostility or anger; for by doing so we rid ourselves of them and escape the danger of bottling them up. For if we suppress such a feeling, its traces are bound to appear in our personalities and to threaten their soundness.

Keep us away from exciting, stimulating atmospheres, and do not multiply orders and demands, but allow us to relax and to be lazy now and then. Do not meddle too much in our private affairs, but leave us room to think and to weigh, and to decide for ourselves certain matters that concern us. And no harm if this leads to the committing of a few mistakes, for we may learn from our mistakes more than we learn from sermons and instructions.

Allow us to proceed in our growth at our own rate, and do not require us to talk or walk or read at the age at which our elder sister talked, or our brother walked, or the neighbors' daughter learned to read.

And last, but not least, entrust our care to one who loves us and understands us, who takes delight in guiding and directing us, and who has patience in helping us to do our tasks by ourselves.

These are the demands that surge in every child's breast; he wishes he might be given the chance to proclaim them aloud and to press for their fulfillment. For all their simplicity and the ease of granting them, they are of surpassing importance in education, because they affect the educational atmosphere, and hence the children's minds and personalities, and in many cases they determine the measure of our success in the various processes of education. And these are drawn from the psychological foundations whose soundness educational experiment has proved.

I have chosen to raise them out of love for our little ones, and out of my desire that we secure for them the atmosphere necessary to their growth and their happiness, whether in the home or at school.